Katie Conboy is the 14th President of Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, IN. Prior to Saint Mary’s, Dr. Conboy was provost and senior vice president at Simmons University from 2013-2020. Before Simmons, Conboy served for thirteen years as provost at Stonehill College, where she was also a tenured Professor of English, having begun as a faculty member there in 1987.
As provost at Simmons, Conboy led the process to redesign the academic structure of the university, creating four new interdisciplinary colleges and hiring four new deans for those colleges. She oversaw the implementation of two signature graduate degrees in an online format — Master of Social Work, and Master of Science in Nursing — which resulted in a substantial increase in enrollment and new revenue.
Conboy earned her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Notre Dame in 1986, and her undergraduate degree at the University of Kansas in 1981. As an administrator, she has continued to be a life-long learner, completing the Advanced Management Program at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and the Non-Profit Financial Stewardship Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
She co-edited the book Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (Columbia University Press, 1997), and is the author of scholarly articles on British and American fiction, Irish literature and feminist theory.
She is married to Dr. Thomas O’Grady, who recently retired after a 35-year career on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he was a professor of English, director of the Irish Studies program, and a member of the Creative Writing faculty. They have three grown daughters: Mairéad, Caitríona, and Siobhán.