President's Biography

Jonathan Veitch became the 15th president of Occidental College on July 1, 2009. The former dean of The New School's Eugene Lang College in New York City, Veitch is a leading advocate for liberal arts education.

At Occidental, Veitch has launched a new integrated planning process to better chart the College's future, sought to create new partnerships with premier cultural institutions in Southern California, and strengthened Occidental's civic engagement, arts, and global literacy programs. Under his leadership, Occidental is moving forward with the construction of a new alumni center and the renovation of 95-year-old Swan Hall, which houses more than one-third of Oxy's faculty.

A Los Angeles native and graduate of Stanford University, he received his doctoral degree in the History of American Civilization from Harvard. Veitch taught in the English department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison before joining The New School. As an associate professor of literature and history, Veitch's service included stints as chair of humanities and associate provost before his five-year term as dean in which he focused on expanding Lang's size and scope to take advantage of its status as an urban liberal arts college.

The author of the award-winning American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), Veitch's fields of academic specialization include 19th- and 20th-century American literature and cultural history, and American film. His latest research has focused on the history of higher education in the United States. Jonathan, his wife Sarah and their three children live in the Wallis Annenberg President's House on the Occidental campus.