Dr. Jon Parrish Peede became the president of Ashland University and Ashland Theological Seminary in June 2024. In his inaugural year, the institution achieved a multimillion-dollar budget surplus, grew the freshmen class size by eight percent, secured the third-largest annual fundraising in AU’s history and was awarded its first federal arts grant in more than 60 years.
Peede is committed to civil discourse and intellectual diversity of thought on campus, experiential learning opportunities for students and shared governance. He has spoken at 75 universities and cultural organizations, including several in Ohio, and he awarded more than $10 million in federal grants to Buckeye nonprofits.
Peede is the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he awarded $500 million in federal grants. The NEH chairmanship is a presidentially nominated position. Peede was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate--an example of bipartisan support throughout his career.
As NEH chairman, Peede had sole authority of awarding more than 1,000 annual grants and managed a $237 million budget. He funded liberal arts education, undergraduate and graduate curriculum innovation, museum and library programming, documentary films and multimedia works, cultural infrastructure projects and humanities scholarship.
In addition to two White House appointments, Peede served as co-director of the American Civics Project; publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia; literature grants director at the National Endowment for the Arts; and director of the NEA Big Read program. He has been selected as principal investigator on four federal grants. He has written speeches for a U.S. President and First Lady, and he co-edited two books on American religious writers.
For eight years, Peede directed the “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience” program. The federal program resulted in an acclaimed anthology from Random House, an Emmy Award-winning documentary and the nation’s largest literary archive of U.S. troop writing from Iraq and Afghanistan. Peede conducted more than 50 writing workshops domestically and in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and on ships in the Persian Gulf.
Peede has served in an ex officio capacity on six federal boards, including the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission and the board of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
A native of Mississippi, he holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Vanderbilt University, a master’s degree in Southern studies from the University of Mississippi and a doctorate in English pedagogy from Murray State University. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and American Mensa.
Peede is married to Rev. Nancy Hollomon-Peede, who has been a minister for more than 35 years. She also served as a chaplain at Harvard University. They live in Ashland, Ohio, and have a daughter, Somerset, a violist who resides in Australia.
