Jon Parrish Peede (pronounced PEE-dee) has been serving as the president of Ashland University and Ashland Theological Seminary since June 1, 2024.

A proven consensus builder and thoughtful leader, Peede is the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and possesses more than 25 years in leadership positions in higher education and federal agencies. He brought a diverse set of experiences to Ashland, having been a faculty member, fundraiser, public speaker, fiscally sound manager and strategic communicator.

Peede views the liberal arts and STEM as complementary to one another in the development of Ashland’s well-rounded graduates. He is a strong advocate for improved access to education, civil discourse and intellectual diversity of thought, experiential learning opportunities for students and shared governance, and believes those are markers of institutional excellence.

Peede’s career has spanned six institutions, and his impressive credentials are headlined by a term as chairman of the NEH in Washington, D.C. He led the agency from July 2017 to January 2021. The NEH chairman position is presidentially nominated and Senate confirmed—Peede was unanimously confirmed within seven weeks of nomination, an example of the bipartisan support he received.

As NEH chairman, Peede had sole authority of awarding approximately 1,000 annual grants and managed a $237 million annual budget and 170-person full-time staff. He awarded $500 million in support of liberal arts education, undergraduate and graduate curriculum innovation, museum and library programming, documentary films and multimedia works, cultural infrastructure projects and humanities scholarship.

Peede’s professional career has also included time at the University of Virginia where he was the publisher of the award-winning “Virginia Quarterly Review,” a national journal of literature and discussion. At the National Endowment for the Arts, he served as director of “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience,” director of literature grants and counselor to then-NEA chairman Dana Gioia. At Millsaps College, Peede was the director of communications, and at Mercer University Press he edited academic books.

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Right before coming to Ashland, Peede was an educational consultant and a faculty member in the department of English and foreign languages at Mississippi Valley State University, a historically Black college and university. Also, Peede once served as a visiting faculty member of Ashland’s acclaimed MFA in Creative Writing program.

Originally from Brandon, Miss., Peede’s passion for education and literature led him to Vanderbilt University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. He also holds a master’s degree in Southern studies from the University of Mississippi and will complete a doctorate in English pedagogy at Murray State University in May 2025. Of note, Peede is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and American Mensa.

Peede is married to Rev. Nancy Hollomon-Peede, who has been a spiritual director and minister for various denominations and churches during her 35-year career in ministry. She also served as a chaplain at Harvard University. They have a daughter, Somerset, who is pursuing a postgraduate viola performance degree at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in Australia.

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