Pareena Lawrence

With an extensive higher education leadership background, Pareena Lawrence is a visiting fellow at Yale University’s MacMillan Center. Pareena Lawrence focuses her scholarship on the effectiveness of elected female officials in grassroots development and governance across Northern India and is assisting in strategic projects for the Office of International Affairs.

From 2011 to 2017, Dr. Lawrence served Augustana College as their provost and dean of the college and as a professor of economics. She spearheaded initiatives that meaningfully enhanced student learning outcomes and student success while developing faculty opportunities and new academic and co-curricular programs. A particular accomplishment was helping faculty to redesign and rethink the breadth of the curriculum to reflect the outcome of the faculty vote that shifted courses from trimesters to a semester calendar along with credit hours per course. At the same time, she helped re-envision the liberal arts and major curriculum in ways that bridged the outmoded and artificial divide between traditional and applied programs and curriculum and co-curriculum.

Dr. Lawrence’s background also includes a long tenure at the University of Minnesota, Morris, as chair of the division of social sciences and professor of economics and management. Extensively published in her field, Pareena Lawrence co-authored a book titled, Life Histories of Women Panchayat Sarpanches from Haryana, India: From the Margins to the Center (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).