Ephraim
Michael Austin is the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah. Prior to coming to Utah in October of 2023, he served as the Provost at both the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana (2008-2016) and at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas (2016-2023). Dr. Austin holds bachelor's and master's degrees in English from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. In English literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara, he began his career teaching composition, world literature, and British literature at Shepherd College in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
Dr. Austin is the author of nine books on a variety of literary, political, and cultural topics, including Useful Fictions: Evolution, Cognition, and the Origins of Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), and Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist(University of Illinois Press, 2021). He has won four awards from the Association for Mormon Letters (two in criticism and two in religious nonfiction) and was presented with the AML Lifetime Achievement Award for 2021. He is the co-founder of By Common Consent Press and a member of the Dialogue board of directors, which he chaired from 2019-2021.