About Penny Gill

To her complete astonishment, Penny Gill received a teaching from Manjushri many years ago, in which he re-framed our distress over our current global situation – endemic violent conflicts, climate change, and a global economy careening out of control.

A long time professor of politics, the Mary Lyon Professor of Humanities, and the Dean of  Mount Holyoke College, Penny spent her career teaching undergraduates how to think more deeply about politics and economics. Educated first at Northwestern University (B.A.) and Yale University (M.A., M. Phil, and Ph.D.) all in political science, she pursued a broad range of interests in European politics, political thought, and contemporary processes of globalization.

She has been a student of the work of C. G. Jung, especially his rich approach to dreams. Mid career she had a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago, where she studied the medieval women mystics. She has immersed herself in several wisdom traditions and their spiritual paths, She lives now on Madeline Island with her Tibetan Terrier and paddles her red kayak in the waters of Lake Superior.