Leadership

Dr. Patriann Smith: A Legacy of Leadership

From the humble shores of Saint Lucia to the highest levels of academic and organizational leadership in the United States and across the globe, Dr. Patriann Smith has built a legacy of transformative leadership that is both visionary and deeply rooted in service, justice, and the advancement of humanity.

Executive Leadership

Associate Dean of Faculty Success & Excellence

Dr. Smith currently serves as Associate Dean of Faculty Success and Excellence and Professor in the College of Education at the University of South Florida (USF), one of the nation’s largest and most diverse public research universities. In this executive role, she champions faculty development, equity, and excellence at institutional scale — ensuring that USF’s faculty are supported, celebrated, and empowered to do their best work.

Prior to her current role, Dr. Smith has served in a range of institutional leadership capacities at USF, including as Governance Committee Chair in the Department of Language, Literacy, Exceptional Education, Ed.D., and Physical Education, and as Parliamentarian of the USF Faculty Senate, serving under the leadership of Faculty Senate President Dr. Jenifer Jasinski Schneider and University President Rhea Law. She has also served as an Executive Member of the Caribbean Community Association (CCA) at USF.

Professional Organization Leadership

President, Literacy Research Association

Dr. Smith serves as President of the Literacy Research Association (LRA), one of the world’s leading professional organizations dedicated to advancing research in literacy. Her presidential leadership follows distinguished service as LRA Vice President (2024–2025) and President-Elect (2025–2026), roles in which she has championed equity, innovation, and international collaboration across the field of literacy research.

As President, Dr. Smith chairs the 2026 LRA Annual Conference — a landmark event that represents her commitment to centering diverse voices, advancing justice-oriented research, and building a global community of literacy scholars. Her leadership within LRA is a direct extension of her lifelong commitment to reimagining what is possible for students, educators, and communities whose languages, literacies, and lives have been systematically undervalued.

Global Leadership

United Nations, UNESCO & the World Stage

A sought-after global voice, Dr. Smith has been invited to speak and lead at the most prestigious international platforms in the world. She has addressed audiences for the United Nations, UNESCO, the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans, and Oxford University — bringing her scholarship on race, language, and literacy to the world’s most important conversations about educational justice.

Her international leadership extends to her role as Principal Investigator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) RISE Caribbean initiative (2021–2024) at USF and her co-founding of the RISE Caribbean Educational Research Center (CERC) — a landmark initiative advancing literacy and educational research across the Caribbean.

Research Leadership

Pioneering Frameworks that Are Reshaping Education

Dr. Smith’s leadership is not only institutional — it is profoundly intellectual. She has developed a suite of pioneering frameworks that are reshaping how researchers, educators, and policymakers understand language, literacy, and learning across the globe:

• Transraciolinguistics — a groundbreaking approach that foregrounds how race intersects with language to shape literacies and educational opportunity
• Black Immigrant Literacies — a landmark framework for understanding and affirming the holistic literacies of Black immigrant students
• Translanguaging with Englishes — a lens for centering the multilingual repertoires of Caribbean and immigrant youth
• Semiolingual Innocence & Inosans Jan Nwè — a poetic and rigorous theory of the imaginaries that undergird youth’s literacies
• Raciosemiotic Architecture — a conceptual tool for understanding the racial semiotics embedded in language and literacy systems

These frameworks have been published in the field’s most prestigious journals — including the American Educational Research Journal, Reading Research Quarterly, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, and Teachers College Record — and have influenced scholarship, teaching, and policy across the United States, the Caribbean, and beyond.

Awards & Recognition

A Leader Recognized at the Highest Levels

Dr. Smith’s leadership has been recognized by institutions, organizations, and peers across the world. Among her many honors:

• Modern Language Association (MLA) Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize Honorable Mention — for Black Immigrant Literacies (2024)
• Women in Leadership & Philanthropy Award, University of South Florida (2024)
• Principal Investigator, USAID RISE Caribbean Initiative — a $3.6M grant advancing literacy research across the Caribbean (2021–2024)
• International Literacy Association (ILA) Member
• American Educational Research Association (AERA) Member and Conference Presenter
• Literacy Research Association (LRA) — Oscar S. Causey Award panel participant

A Gracious Invitation

Leading with Love, Grace, and an Unwavering Stance

Dr. Smith’s leadership is animated by a deeply personal and profoundly public commitment to justice — one rooted in her identity as a Saint Lucian American scholar-mother-educator racialized as Black. From the villages of Mon-Repos, Saint Lucia, where she grew up immersed in the linguistic richness of French Creole and St. Lucian English Vernacular, to the halls of the world’s most influential institutions, she has led with love, grace, and an unwavering and unapologetically firm stance.

She invites all — researchers, educators, policymakers, practitioners, and advocates — to join her in building a future where every language, every culture, and every learner is recognized as a source of brilliance. For us, redemptive destiny is all.