Speakers
- Jill DolanAffiliationDean of the College; Annan Professor of English
- Robert P. GeorgeAffiliationMcCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions
Details

Freeing the Mind: What Truly Matters in a Princeton Education
What’s the point of a Princeton education? What is liberal arts learning all about? How can students make the most of opportunities afforded to them by liberal arts colleges and universities? Two of Princeton’s most distinguished scholars and acclaimed teachers, Professor Robert George and Dean Jill Dolan, will explore these questions in a public dialogue entitled: “Freeing the Mind: What Truly Matters in a Princeton Education.”
*Princeton First-Year Families Weekend - open to the public, to students and families of students.
Jill Dolan is the Dean of the College at Princeton University, where she also serves as the Annan Professor in English and Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts. She directed Princeton’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies from 2009-2015 and became Dean in July 2015.
She began teaching at Princeton in 2008, arriving from the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama and headed the Department of Theatre and Dance’s MA/MFA/PhD program in performance as a public practice from 1999-2008.
Dolan received the 2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for her blog, “The Feminist Spectator.”
In 2013, Palgrave Macmillan published her book, The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism on Stage and Screen, which collects 20 of her blog posts and includes 10 new essays, as well as an extended introduction and a “how to” section that discusses the nuts and bolts of writing feminist cultural criticism.
She received the 2013 Distinguished Scholar Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in Scholarship in the Field of Theatre Studies from the American Society for Theatre Research. In 2011, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women and Theatre Program. Dolan was inaugurated into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in 2009. In 2016, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds J.D. and M.T.S. degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.