Dear School of Liberal Arts Community,
This year’s first newsletter comes a little later than we’d expected, as emergency preparations and recovery from a Category 2 hurricane absorbed several of us in the Dean’s Office. As a welcome bonus, we’ve already been through our first major weather event of the year! Overall the city and the university weathered this storm well, though many in our community had prolonged power outages and some had flooding. I certainly hope you did not experience too much negative impact from Hurricane Francine.
On the other side of the hurricane, I’m particularly excited about the coming year. This is the beginning of my seventh year as dean, and I greet every new year with a combination of anticipation for all the activities of the coming year and joy about the return of faculty, staff, and students to our campus.
As has become the tradition in our first newsletter of each academic year, we are exceptionally proud to introduce the newest members of our tenure-line and professor of practice faculty. These new colleagues not only bring a wide range of expertise and experience to our community, but they emerge from broad national searches that engaged so many of our colleagues in departments across the humanities, social sciences, and fine and performing arts. Read more about them in the article below.
This summer, we launched the first major renovation of Newcomb Hall since its completion in 1918. While the most immediate impact of this project will of course be disruption — we moved the entire Dean’s Office, the Department of Philosophy, the Language Learning Center, and several faculty and staff from other departments out of the building — the end result, I’m confident, will improve the experience of all members of the School of Liberal Arts, even beyond those whose departments are located there. New event spaces, areas for interdisciplinary programs, classrooms, and collaboration zones will be the purview of the entire community. You can follow our progress at this website, which we update as new information becomes available.
This year we inaugurate a new academic event which represents a cross-school partnership with your colleagues in the environmental sciences — the Flowerree Symposium. Also new this year, our STEM2 Studies initiative is a sequence of team-taught courses pairing Liberal Arts faculty with our colleagues in the School of Science and Engineering and School of Medicine. And our second Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar gets underway with a series of events and speakers on the global and domestic contexts for our understanding of reproductive health.
There’s much more to come this year, of course — as always. I look forward to seeing you soon!
Brian T. Edwards
Dean and Professor
School of Liberal Arts
Tap Headshot for Bio
*SLA Faculty Fellows are recruited shortly after completing their PhD studies and pursue a tenure-track professor path.