R. Danielle Egan was named 12th president of Bennington College, effective August 2026. Egan began her higher educational journey in community college after dropping out of high school. She transferred to Goucher College where she earned a B.A. in sociology and women’s studies and developed a true passion for the liberal arts. She pursued a PhD in sociology from Boston College; and, returned to graduate school to earn a PsyaD in clinical psychoanalysis from the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. Egan began her teaching career at St. Lawrence University earning tenure and achieving the rank of Professor.  In 2017, she joined the faculty at Connecticut College as Department Chair and Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality Studies and was named Dean of the Faculty and Chief Academic Officer in 2022. 

A prolific and interdisciplinary scholar, Egan's research explores the social construction of sexuality. She is the author and co-author of three books, the co-editor of two books, and has published more than 25 articles, reviews, and op-ed columns. Her research has been cited in more than 1,700 texts and has been internationally recognized and used in various governmental reports in the UK and Australia. Her first book, Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: Exploring the Relationships between Exotic Dancers and their Regular Customers (Palgrave 2006), analyzes the complex ways desire, fantasy, and power shape the dynamics between dancers and their regular customers in gendered and racialized ways. Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (Palgrave 2010) explores the discursive production of ideas surrounding children’s sexuality, across a variety of disciplines and social movements between 1840-1940. This project illuminates how the figure of the child was used as a proxy for the nation state, normality, conceptions of class, and heterosexuality. Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of Girls and Sexualization (Polity 2013) highlights the class and racialized assumptions underpinning certain discourses on sexualization and illuminates the distinction between political discourse and empirical research on the behaviour of young people. Becoming Sexual was named the book of the week by the Times Higher Education Supplement and has been reviewed and/or featured in The Guardian and The Australian. Egan’s research has also been discussed on BBC Radio 4 and NPR's Good Parenting Radio. Her research with Gail Hawkes was sought out by the Home Office in England and by the Scottish Government. She contributed to the Wellcome Archive and Trust Report on Sexualization.

A human-centered and strategic administrator, Egan has helped reinvigorate and shape new directions for two departments, a Center for Teaching and Learning, as well as college-wide initiatives. She served in a variety of shared governance committees both as a faculty member and as an administrator and believes in the power of shared governance. Throughout her career, she has led major initiatives for curricular innovation and change, helped institute new budgetary practices to ensure long term financial sustainability, successfully fundraised, and created new opportunities for faculty, staff, and students.