In January 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Carole M. Watson to serve as Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a position she will hold until the nomination and Senate confirmation of the agency’s next Chairman.

Most recently Watson served as the NEH Assistant Chairman for Partnership and National Affairs. In this position, she oversaw liaison with the National Council on the Humanities, the Federal/State Partnership, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the National Trust for the Humanities, and other institutions and organizations important to the NEH. 

Previously she served as Deputy NEH Chairman and as Interim Executive Director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities from February to December 2001.

Before joining the NEH Chairman’s staff in 1995, Watson directed the National Endowment’s Division of State Programs (now Federal/State Partnership) and the Office of Outreach. 

Prior to her tenure at NEH, Watson directed Inter-cultural programs at the Lindenwood Colleges in Saint Charles, Mo., and was founding English department chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity School in St. Louis, Mo. 

Watson is a recipient of Blewett and Ford Foundation fellowships and in 1991 became a fellow of the Council for Excellence in Government. She received her doctoral degree in American cultural history from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and her M.A. degree in English and American literature from St. Louis University, St. Louis, Mo.

Watson is the author of Prologue (Greenwood Press, 1985), a study of the novels written by African American women between 1859 and 1965.