Augusta Rohrbach

Associate Provost for Faculty Initiatives

As associate provost for faculty initiatives, Augusta originates and coordinates large-scale initiatives aimed at promoting faculty success, such as cluster hires and Bridge Professorships as well as window-of-opportunity and dual-career hires. She provides structural imagination for institutional growth, looking for opportunities to support the schools in expanding faculty capabilities. Overall, Augusta’s work is focused on building faculty opportunities for greater community, networking, and intellectual exchange at Tufts–and beyond.  

Augusta previously served as Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR). During her time with the OVPR, Augusta played a leading role in launching key cross-functional initiatives, including the Research & Scholarship Strategic Plan, Tufts Springboard, and the COVID-19 Pooled Testing project.  

She holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. With over a decade of experience as a faculty member, Augusta’s scholarly publications include Truth Stranger than Fiction: Race, Realism, and the U.S. Literary Marketplace (Palgrave 2002) and Thinking Outside the Book (UMass 2014). Augusta found an outlet for her passion to expand intellectual exchange, community, and collaboration as Editor-in-Chief of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. Those interests continue to inform her work at Tufts.