Catharine R. Stimpson was appointed dean of NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Science in 1998 and is a University Professor.

Prior to her arrival at NYU, Stimpson was director of the MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program. She has also served as University Professor at Rutgers, where she was also dean of the graduate school and vice provost for graduate education from 1986 to 1992. She also is a former chair of the New York State Humanities Council and the National Council for Research on Women, and president of the Modern Language Association. She was the first director of the Women's Center of Barnard College and of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers.

Stimpson's many publications include the book Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces and the Library of America's Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903-1932. The author of a novel, Class Notes, she is the editor of seven books and has published over 150 monographs, essays, stories, and reviews in the Transatlantic Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Critical Inquiry, boundary 2, and others. She was the founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society for the University of Chicago Press.

Stimpson has received a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship and has also been a Fulbright Fellow and Woodrow Wilson Fellow. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Institute, the Lilly Foundation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Exxon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Stimpson holds a B.A. from Bryn Mawr (1955), a B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University (1960, 1966), and Ph.D. from Columbia (1967).