Dr. Stephen Reid appointed Vice Provost for Faculty Diversity & Belonging

Dear Faculty and Staff:

I am pleased to share with you that Stephen B. Reid, Ph.D., Professor of Christian Scriptures with Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, has been selected to serve in a new position as the University’s Vice Provost for Faculty Diversity & Belonging.

In collaboration with academic deans and other senior leaders, Dr. Reid will help articulate how Baylor’s commitment to diversity emanates from our Christian mission while also being solutions-oriented. Among his responsibilities will be developing resources, strategies and infrastructure to enhance the diversity of candidate pools and hires for departmental faculty searches and increasing retention of underrepresented faculty (racial, ethnic and gender) by ensuring networks of support and belonging across the array of diverse Christian identities at the University. 

Dr. Reid also will work with individual departments in developing educational and curricular programming for faculty that addresses discipline-specific concerns regarding diversity and our Christian heritage. He will be a liaison for various faculty-focused diversity initiatives, such as the Black Faculty and Staff Association, the Latinx Faculty Staff Association, the Faculty of Color Alliance, Women’s Colloquium, and Women in Science and Engineering, conduct scholarly work in diversity as an academic discipline and collaborate with Student Life, the President’s Office and other diversity leaders across campus. In addition, Dr. Reid will create and maintain web content on the Provost’s Office website about our commitment to diversity.

Dr. Reid earned his Bachelor of Science in religion from Manchester University, an M.Div. in theology from Bethany Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in theology from Emory University. He joined the Truett Seminary faculty in fall 2008 from Bethany, where he served as Academic Dean and Professor of Old Testament. In 1990, he joined the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary faculty, after serving nearly 10 years as associate professor of Hebrew Scriptures and Biblical Theology at Pacific School of Religion. Reid began his teaching career at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. Reid is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and the Catholic Biblical Association and serves on the editorial board of the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion. He is the author or editor of several books and has written numerous journal articles and other publications. His current research focuses on the ways African Americans shared the Bible on the path to emancipation. Using technologies to enhance research in the digital humanities, he is developing an open-source Jupyter Notebook that will permit fuzzy matching from various African American primary sources to books in the King James Version (KJV) Bible.

At Baylor, he is faculty advisor for the Truett Black Seminarian Association and serves on numerous committees, including the Academy of Teaching and Learning Advisory Council, Academic Council for Diversity and Belonging, Black Faculty & Staff Association, Baylor University Faculty of Color Alliance, Pruitt Symposium Planning Committee and University Tenure Committee. In the community, he serves on the boards of Transformation Waco and KWBU-FM and is involved with Today's Action Tomorrow's Leaders and the Community Race Relations Coalition, where he is vice chair.

Dr. Reid is ordained in the Church of the Brethren. He has served as interim pastor at both the Fremont Church of the Brethren in Fremont, California, and Saint Paul Cumberland Presbyterian Church in south Austin.

I want to thank the members of the search committee for their selfless service as we worked together on this important appointment for the University: Dean Jeffry Archer (chair), Todd Buras, Kristina Campos-Davis, Tisha Emerson, Ron Johnson, Coretta Pittman, Rishi Sriram and Pat Wilson. Also, I want to extend my personal appreciation to Lori Baker, current Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity, for her tireless efforts in supporting our faculty and providing a foundation for this new position.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Reid on his new August 1, 2022, appointment as we work more effectively with faculty from disciplines across the University and with people who come to Baylor with many different backgrounds and experiences.

Sincerely,

Nancy Brickhouse, Ph.D.
Provost