Valeda F. Dent

Professional Profile

Organizations

• Advisory Board Member, University of Michigan School of Information
• Board of Trustees, Woodruff Arts Center
• Board Vice Chair, Global Village Project
• Board Member, Friends of Village Libraries
• Founder, Rural Village Libraries Research Network

About

Valeda Dent, Ph.D. is currently Vice Provost, Libraries, Michael C. Carlos Museum, and Center for Digital Scholarship at Emory University. She was previously Acting Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs and Vice President, Student Success & Learning Innovation at Hunter College in New York City. Prior to that, she served as University Librarian, Dean, and full professor at St. John’s University in New York. She holds an M.S.W. and M.I.L.S. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Information Science from the Palmer School at Long Island University.

A lifelong researcher with over 30 peer-reviewed articles, books, and book chapters, her primary research interests include the impact of chronic poverty on rural development; rural libraries in Africa and related literacy and reading habits; ethnographic approaches to understanding the user experience; and pervasive technologies. Dr. Dent has published a number of books, including one of the most comprehensive books on rural African libraries - Rural Community Libraries in Africa: Challenges and Impacts - with co-authors Dr. Geoff Goodman and Dr. Michael Kevane. Dr. Dent is the co-founder of the non-profit Rural Village Libraries Research Network and her work in Africa has been published in a wide variety of academic journals and presented internationally at conferences in South Africa, Burkina Faso, China, South Korea, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Greece, Ireland, Uganda, the Netherlands, and Swaziland, to name just a few. Dr. Dent’s ongoing collaboration with Dr. Goodman explores the overlooked impact of early childhood learning interventions on rural preschoolers’ learning and school readiness skills, and Dr. Dent and her husband Dr. Goodman were both previously awarded Fulbright Fellowships which allowed them to spend eight months working in two rural villages in Uganda and teaching at Uganda Martyrs University. Dr. Dent (whose mother is a first cousin to Coretta Scott King) and Dr. Goodman also dedicate personal and professional time to advancing racial equity and social justice.

Professionally, Dr. Dent has had the privilege of serving as an administrator and a faculty member at a number of institutions, including Rutgers University, King’s College London, and Oxford University. Her information management and library experience includes scholarly communications, large-scale facility improvement, data-supported decision-making, promotion and tenure actions, design thinking, and fiscal planning.

A former marathoner, Dr. Dent now runs, practices, and teaches yoga in her spare time. Dr. Dent and her husband Dr. Geoff Goodman (who has also joined the Emory family as faculty in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, EUPI, and Candler) currently live in Druid Hills with their daughter Carlyn. 

Recent book chapters

Dent, V. (2023). The University Perspective. In King, B. (Ed.), “New Directions in University Museums”. London, U.K.: Lords Publishing. 

Dent, V. & Goodman, G. (2022). Rural Community Libraries in Uganda: Impact and Outcomes. 
In Lo, Peter, Wu, Stephanie, Stark, A., and Allard, B. (Eds.), “Literacy and Reading Programmes for Children and Young People: Case Studies from Around the Globe”. Palm Bay, FL: Apple Academic Press.  

Goodman, G., & Dent, V. F.  (2019).  Studying the effectiveness of the Storytelling/Story-Acting (STSA) play intervention on Ugandan preschoolers’ emergent literacy, oral language, and theory of mind in two rural Ugandan community libraries.  In M. Khosrow-Pour (Ed.), “Early childhood development:  Concepts, methodologies, tools, and applications” (Vol. 3, pp. 1174-1205).  Hershey, PA:  IGI Global.

Recent peer-reviewed articles

Dent, V., Goodman, G., Nimmakayala, K., Morejon, A., Vinh, T., Ottolin, T., & Sutherland, J. “Using a machine learning algorithm to classify drawings of Ugandan preschool children in an early intervention program.” Paper submitted to Empirical Studies of the Arts (under review).

Goodman, G., Dent, V., Lee, S., & Tuman, D. (2022). “Drawings from a play-based intervention: Windows to the soul of rural Ugandan preschool children’s artistic development.” The Arts in Psychotherapy, 77, 101876. 

Goodman, G. & Dent, V. (2020). “Representations of Attachment Security, Attachment Avoidance, and Gender in Young Ugandan Children”. Attachment & Human Development, DOI: 10.1080/14616734.2020.1830480.

Goodman, G. & Dent, V. (2019). “When I Became a Refugee, This Became My Refuge: A Proposal for Implementing a Two-Generation Intervention Using Yoga and Narrative to Promote Mental Health in Syrian Refugee Caregivers and School Readiness in Their Preschool Children.” Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, DOI: 10.1080/15289168.2019.1680939.

Goodman, G. & Dent, V. (2019). “A Story Grows in Rural Uganda: Studying the Effectiveness of the Storytelling/StoryActing (STSA) Play Intervention on Ugandan Preschoolers’ School Readiness Skills.” Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, DOI: 10.1080/15289168.2019.1654272.  

Recent research presentations

Goodman, G., Dent, V., & Coşkun, A. Ugandan caregivers’ content relevance and mental state talk as predictors of preschool children’s mental state talk.  Paper presented at the meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association Annual Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, July 28- 31, 2025.

Passerini, K., Dent, V., Gurani, H., Aksoy, L., Frascatore, M., Joseph, J., & Sharpe, N. How to mitigate risks to academic quality. Panel, Deloitte Risk Management Symposium, New York City, October 30, 2024.

Fleming, D., Barsch, A., Fannon, J., Haushalter, S., Kim, D., Li, C., Marure, C. C., Yang, E., Yang, V., Zhou, D., Zweig, R., Dent, V., & Goodman, G. Relationship between Ugandan caregivers’ quality of life and their storytelling content relevance.  Paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Seattle, WA., August 8-10, 2024.

Zhou, D., Barsch, A., Fannon, J., Fleming, D., Valle-Frias, K., Haushalter, S., Kim, D., Li, C., Marure, C. C., Yang, E., Yang, V., Zweig, R., Dent, V. F., & Goodman, G. Relationships between caregivers’ storytelling content relevance and indices of school readiness in rural Ugandan preschoolers.  Paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Seattle, WA., August 8-10, 2024.

Dent, V., Goodman, G., Nimmakayala, K., Morejon, A., Vihn, T., Ottolin, T., & Sutherland, J. Using machine learning to explore Ugandan children’s stages of drawing development. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, Ottawa, Canada, June 25- 30, 2024.

Fleming, D., Goodman, G., & Dent, V. Relationship among caregivers’ storytelling content relevance and attachment in rural Ugandan preschoolers.  Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, Ottawa, Canada, June 25- 30, 2024.

Goodman, G., Dent, V., & Coşkun, A. Ugandan caregivers’ content relevance and mental state talk as predictors of preschool children’s mental state talk.  Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, Ottawa, Canada, June 25- 30, 2024.

Dent, V., Donahue, V., Lubin, M., Sharpe, N., & Stanley, Tarshia. Expanding the Liberal Arts for Workplace Readiness. American Association of Colleges & Universities Annual Conference, Washington D.C., January 17-19, 2024. 

Goodman, G., Dent, V. F., Chung, H., Cantas, N., Fanciullo, M., & Toker, A.  Once upon a time:  Studying the efficacy of the Storytelling/Story-Acting (STSA) play intervention on Ugandan preschoolers’ narrative coherence, class rankings, and mental state talk in two rural Ugandan community libraries.  54th Society for Psychotherapy Research Annual Conference, Dublin, Ireland, June 21-24, 2023.