Associate Dean Deborah Clarke honored with ASU difference maker award

Arizona State University Professor of English Deborah Clarke, a literary scholar and talented administrator who most recently served as senior associate dean for faculty affairs in the John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering, has been honored with the 2026 Gary Krahenbuhl Difference Maker Award. 

The annual award recognizes and celebrates faculty in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences who personify the spirit of difference‐making demonstrated by former dean Gary Krahenbuhl who recently passed away at the age of 82. 

Regents Professor Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, a pioneering scholar of transborder studies who retired this May, was the award recipient in 2025.

Clarke was not aware that her nomination for the award was in the works.

“I was flabbergasted,” she said. “It’s incredibly gratifying to realize that you’re thought of highly by colleagues.”

The selection of Clarke, who has held multiple leadership roles at the university, nods to the late Krahenbuhl’s difference-making in his administrative career. Clarke came to ASU in 2008 after spending 20 years at Penn State, where she directed various facets of English studies. She quickly became an invaluable member of ASU’s faculty — both for her good humor and wise counsel — and took on increasingly impactful leadership roles. 

As associate dean of faculty in The College in 2013, Clarke served as a principal investigator on the U.S. Department of State research grant “Globalizing Research and Teaching of American Literature,” which aimed to create an academic, research and knowledge exchange to help empower Pakistani women in academia and society.

Clarke eventually landed as the university’s vice provost for academic personnel in 2015, serving in the role through the tumultuous COVID-19 years. She stepped down in 2023, intending to pick up some long-deferred academic research but was soon drafted back into leadership positions. She will retire June 30.

“I’m incredibly grateful to ASU for all of the opportunities it has provided to me,” said Clarke.

Professor Nush Powell, chair of the Department of English, praised Clarke’s leadership abilities: “I didn't have the good fortune to work with Deb as long as many of my colleagues, but from the moment I arrived at ASU, she was an invaluable mentor — sharp, level-headed and witty,” she said. “I never found a question that could stump her.”

Before she was an administrator, Clarke was a highly regarded scholar of literature. Her research focuses on 20th-century American fiction, with particular emphasis on author William Faulkner and women writers.

In her first book, "Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner," she explored how Faulkner's women characters reflected a tension between the body and language, between the literal and figurative. Her second book, "Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America," examined the intersection of American fiction and automobile culture. Clarke’s scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Penn State Humanities Institute, and she has served as a Beatrice Bain Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Clarke said that in retirement she looks forward to restarting her long-deferred research project: a book on modernistModernism was an early 20th-century literary and artistic movement. domesticity and women’s changing roles. She is currently working on an article exploring the “domestic space of hotels” in the fiction of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser.