Office of the Provost names 2025-26 Academic Leadership Program Fellows

Northwestern’s Office of the Provost has named four Academic Leadership Program (ALP) Fellows for the 2025-26 academic year.

This year’s fellows are Jennifer Cole and Rebecca Zorach from the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Ryan Dohoney from the Bienen School of Music and Jacequeline Babb from Medill.

ALP is an intensive year-long program that develops the leadership and managerial skills of faculty who have demonstrated exceptional ability and academic promise. Nominated by deans and selected by Provost Kathleen Hagerty, ALP Fellows attend in-person conferences at alternating Big Ten institutions and participate in on-campus activities at their home institution.

Jacqueline Babb is a Senior Lecturer of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) and director of the full-time IMC program. She teaches strategy courses in marketing and IMC. She is a national speaker and a professor in HubSpot's popular social media marketing strategy certification. She is a regular contributor to AdWeek, Brandingmag, and PRSA; she has been interviewed by the Washington Post, CNN, and AdAge about branding and digital marketing. Babb is an author of a Principles of Marketing textbook for OpenStax, an open educational resource. Babb's professional background is in the nonprofit sector, and her expertise lies in nonprofit marketing, purpose-driven brands, consumer trust and brand effectiveness.

Jennifer Cole is a Professor of Linguistics and Associate Dean for Faculty in Weinberg. She also is director of the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab. Her work investigates the sound patterns of human languages. Her research examines speech dynamics in human languages with a focus on prosody—the  intonation and temporal patterns of language. Her broad goal is to understand the ways in which languages and dialects differ in their sound “profile” and the cognitive systems that support real-time speech production and comprehension. She explores how prosody functions simultaneously to encode sentence and discourse structure, the speaker’s communicative intentions, their attitudes and emotions, and the dynamics of social interaction. 

Ryan Dohoney is a Professor of Musicology and Director of Graduate Music Studies. He is a scholar of U.S. and European modernism and experimentalism in the 20th and 21st centuries. His research documents the relationships produced by musical performance and artistic collaboration within interdisciplinary artistic communities. He draws upon insights from ethnomusicology, microhistory, affect theory, religious studies, and phenomenology and combine these interdisciplinary methods with rigorous archival research. He also advises a wide range of PhD students and is particularly interested in working with researchers investigating musical modernism (broadly construed), experimental music, music philosophy, LGBTQ topics, and science/technology studies.

Rebecca Zorach is a Professor of Art History and President-elect of the Faculty Senate. Zorach teaches and writes on early modern European art (15th-17th century), contemporary activist art, and art of the 1960s and 1970s. Her particular interests include print media, feminist and queer theory, theory of representation, African American artists, and the multiple intersections of art and politics. The author of several books, she is at work on a new project that will consider the relationship of artistic and political agency to natural and social ecologies. She is a member of Feel Tank Chicago, on the board of the South Side Community Art Center and South Side Projections, and co-organizes the archive and oral history project Never The Same with Daniel Tucker (never-the-same.org).