Columbia University

Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Divisional Deans

The Divisional Deans play a leading role in academic, capital, and campaign planning for the Arts and Sciences divisions. They report directly to the executive vice president, and work with each other and the EVP to ensure the overall coordination of their efforts with the senior staff (especially within academic affairs).

They exercise supervision of academic departments, research centers, institutes and other major units in their division. This includes faculty business that consists of searches, hires, leaves and retentions. They also play a role in budgeting with setting salaries in conjunction with the respective chair, determining research support funding, and monitoring their division’s expenditures. Additionally, they manage renovations and space requests, ARC reviews and oversee research misconduct, conflict of interest, conflict of commitment and equal opportunity.  

Dean of Humanities

Sarah Cole specializes in British literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, with an emphasis on the modernist period. Areas of interest include war and violence, history and memory, sexuality and the body, and Irish literature of the modernist period. She is the author of two books, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and co-directs the NYNJ Modernism Seminar, a regional scholarly colloquium. She has published articles in journals such as ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity, and PMLA, and has written essays for a variety of edited collections. Professor Cole received a B.A. in English from Williams College and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.  She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggeinheim Fellowship for a book project entitled "The Wells Era."  

Dean of Science

Peter de Menocal is the Thomas Alva Edison/Con Edison Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (DEES). He is a geological oceanographer who uses geochemical analyses of deep-sea sediments to understand how and why past climates have changed and how this has impacted human sustainability. He is the founding director of the Center for Climate and Life at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, comprising more than 120 doctoral-level scientists working to understand climate change impacts on life’s essentials: our access to food, water, shelter, and energy.As Dean of Science, he oversees 215 faculty members in the nine science departments within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is committed to advancing the sciences at Columbia, fostering relationships with researchers and organizations across the university and around the world, and building the resources and capacity needed to support Columbia science and ensure its future impact. A former vice chair and chair of DEES and former vice chair of the Earth Institute faculty, Dean de Menocal is the author of more than 100 scientific papers and book chapters and his work has been featured in more than a dozen documentaries. He received his bachelor’s degree from St. Lawrence University, master’s in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island, and master’s and Ph.D. in geology from Columbia. He is the recipient of the Lenfest Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award, the Distinguished Brooksian Award, an honorary Doctor of Science degree from St. Lawrence, and is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Dean of Social Science

Fredrick Harris is Professor of Political Science and directs the Center on African-American Politics and Society. Professor Harris's research interests include American politics with a focus on race and politics, political participation, social movements, religion and politics, political development, and African-American politics. His publications include Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism, which was awarded the V.O. Key Award by the Southern Political Science Association, the Best Book Award by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the Best Book Award by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. He is also the co-author of Countervailing Forces in African-American Civic Activism,1973-1994 with Valeria Sinclair-Chapman and Brian McKenzie, which received the W.E.B. DuBois Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism.

Articles include "The Macro Dynamics of Black Political Participation in the Post-Civil Rights Era" with Valeria Sinclair-Chapman and Brian McKenzie in the Journal of Politics and "It Takes a Tragedy to Arouse Them: Collective Memory and Collective Action during the Civil Rights Movement" in Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Political Protest. This article received the Mary Parker Follet Award for best article by the American Political Science Association's section on Politics and History. Professor Harris is co-editor with Cathy Cohen of the Oxford University Press book series "Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities" and is the co-principal investigator of a major 2008 pre-election race relations poll with the ABC News Polling Unit. His essays have appeared in the Washington Post (Perspectives), The New York Times (Sunday Review), and the London Review of Books. He has appeared as a commentator for a variety of media outlets including Good Morning America, National Public Radio, CNN, and MSNBC.
 
Professor Harris's most recent books are The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Fall of Black Politics (2012), which is published by Oxford University Press, and, with Robert Lieberman, Beyond Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in a Post-Racist Era (2013), which is published by the Russell Sage Foundation. Professor Harris received the B.A. from the University of Georgia and the Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and is a recipient of the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award at Columbia.