Eileen Fung

Eileen Fung is the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of San Francisco. Provost Eileen has dedicated over 26 years to USF, including significant time in academic leadership. She is responsible for the university’s five schools, libraries, academic affairs, enrollment management, online programs, international relations, and diversity and community outreach for the university’s 10,000 students, 1,000 faculty, and 1,000 staff.

Provost Fung was awarded the James Irvine Dissertation Fellowship in 1997, and hired as a full-time faculty member in the Department of English in 1998. She served as chair of the English department and director of the Asian American Pacific Studies Program before her appointment as associate dean of arts and humanities in 2010. She became senior associate dean in 2019, interim dean in 2021 and dean in 2022.

As a first-generation college student from a Chinese immigrant family, she advocates for an equitable, mission-driven, community-engaged, and student-centered education. To that end, she conceptualized and founded the Honors College with a $15 million endowment gift from Gordon Getty ’56 and served as its founder and associate dean and then dean. She was instrumental in securing a $1.5 million gift from Richard Blum to establish the Privett Global Honors Scholars Program to support faculty development of global educational curricula and provide funding for student immersion and study abroad opportunities. She currently serves as one of the principal investigators of a multi-year, $1.5 million Andrew W. Mellon grant to support the matriculation of underrepresented and underserved students from the Foothill-De Anza Community College District to USF. She helped USF to become a Minority Serving Institution (MSI) and received its first Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISI) grant, a multi year grant award of $1.4 million in 2023.

After receiving a BA in English literature with a minor in Asian American studies from UC Los Angeles, Provost Fung earned a PhD in medieval English literature — with specializations in feminist and post-colonial theories and ethnic American literature — from UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests lie in examining the intersection of literature and identity through cultural practices in the genres of travel and food narratives.

• The intersections of race, gender, sexuality, diaspora, and post-colonialism in medieval English travel narratives
• Chinese and Taiwanese American literature and film
• Her current research explores (im)migration, diaspora, and the hybridization of culinary cultures in Asian and Asian Pacific American foodways

• Dean, the College of Arts and Sciences
• Senior Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
• Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences

• PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara