Laura Skandera Trombley, Southwestern University’s 16th President, is the first woman chosen to lead Texas’s first university and is a preeminent Mark Twain scholar. As a graduate student, Trombley was the first scholar to examine and catalog the largest cache of Mark Twain letters to date leading to her first book, Mark Twain in the Company of Women, which Choice selected as one of the outstanding academic books of 1995. Trombley holds a B.A. and M.A. in English from Pepperdine University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Southern California.