Senior Leadership

Yolanda Zepeda works to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across the university, supporting collaborations and idea exchange among academic units, faculty, students and staff. She oversees strategic diversity planning and reporting, and promotes inclusive practices in faculty recruitment and hiring. Yolanda also oversees targeted programs that promote success of students from diverse backgrounds including Latine students, students in STEMM and parenting students. She directs the campus magazine, ¿Que Pasa, Ohio State?, a publication that highlights Latine scholarship and engagement.

Since joining The Ohio State University in 2006, Dr. Andreá N. Williams has served widely on college and university committees and contributed to initiatives dedicated to diversity, inclusion and women's advancement. She was recognized with the university's Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award in 2016.

Andreá is director of The Women's Place and an associate professor in the Department of English, specializing in African American and 19th-century American literature. As a literary historian, Andreá is drawn to questions about the social and material conditions that historically have enabled or inhibited African Americans in producing literature and art. She is the author of Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction (2013). Her current work traces the lives and literature of unmarried African American women who helped to cultivate singleness as a viable long-term lifestyle in the 20th century. Andreá's research has been awarded grants and fellowships from Rutgers University, the National Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

Andreá is an alumna of Spelman College, a historically black women's college in Atlanta, and earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.