New Leadership Team Named at USC College
The USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences begins this academic year with a new dean, who chose five university colleagues to serve as his deputies and brain trust.
Howard Gillman, professor of political science and history, was named dean of USC College in May by President Steven B. Sample.
The selection of Gillman, who was associate vice provost of research advancement at USC, came after a nationwide, yearlong search that attracted more than 500 candidates and was the most systematic College decanal search in decades.
“Because the College represents nothing less than the beating heart of this university, our faculty advisory committee carefully identified, screened and examined numerous outstanding candidates from on campus and across the nation,” said C.L. Max Nikias, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs.
”And in the end, President Sample found that the ideal person to lead the College forward was a renowned faculty scholar and outstanding teacher who has served the College and the university with distinction over the past 17 years.”
Dean Gillman has received numerous awards and accolades for his scholarship. He is widely published and the author of a highly regarded book on the disputed 2000 presidential election. Prominent in his field, he heads the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association. He arrived at USC in 1990.
His dedication to service, academics and the classroom is well recognized. He has chaired the political science department, run its graduate program and received numerous honors as a teacher and scholar at USC College.
Gillman, who took office on June 1, spent his first month in the post discussing the future of the school with a broad range of faculty, administrators and alumni and, on July 2, announced his new administration and structure for the College’s leadership team.
“I was looking for excellent scholars, and exemplary College citizens, who shared my passion for making the College a world leader in undergraduate education, graduate programs and research excellence,” he said.
Michael Quick, professor of biological sciences, was named to a newly created position, executive vice dean for academic affairs, charged with coordinating the work of the four new vice deans of USC College.
Vice Dean Elinor Accampo, professor of history and gender studies, will be responsible for promoting the College’s many graduate programs. Vice Dean Dani Byrd, associate professor of linguistics, will oversee research advancement. Vice Dean Steven Lamy, professor of international relations, is now in charge of advancing the College’s undergraduate programs. And Vice Dean Edwin McCann, professor of philosophy and English, will focus on faculty affairs.
“This team is diverse in its academic expertise,” Gillman said. “They remind us that the governance of a great liberal arts college is, fundamentally, the responsibility of an engaged and scholarly faculty.”
Gillman explained that an advantage of the new structure is that much of the day-to-day supervision of academic affairs will go to Quick.
“I hope that allows me to maintain a broader perspective, focus on our most fundamental and important goals, including outreach to the larger Trojan Family and working closely with College advisory boards to build on our momentum and move the Tradition & Innovation fundraising initiative forward,” he said.
The new structure will also better integrate the functions of each of the vice deans and broaden their focus.
“Increasingly the missions of graduate programs, undergraduate programs, faculty affairs and research advancement are interrelated,” he said. “It is hard to recruit faculty without at the same time thinking about the way we promote research in the College or what we expect of them as undergraduate teachers. It is impossible to think about developing graduate programs without thinking about developing a world-class faculty. We can’t think about undergraduate development without thinking about the incorporation of research opportunities on the undergraduate side.”
Quick served as the dean of research during the administrations of Peter Starr and Joseph Aoun.
Quick attended Oglethorpe University in Atlanta and served in the Peace Corps. He received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Emory University in 1992. He served on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Alabama School of Medicine before joining USC College in 2002.
He uses biological tools to understand how the brain produces behavior on the molecular level. His research in neural communication has implications for treatment of a range of diseases, neural disorders and addictions. Quick has earned a number of top teaching awards at USC, and is a faculty fellow in the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching.
Accampo, the most recent past president of the College Faculty Council, received her Ph.D. in history from UC Berkeley in 1984. Prior to coming to USC in 1983, she held positions at Colorado College and Denison University.
She studies 19th and 20th century French social and cultural history, and the history of women and gender relations. Her most recent book, Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) examines early 20th century attitudes toward birth control and shows how profoundly reproductive issues influenced French politics, culture and women’s rights.
Byrd received a B.A./M.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in linguistics from UCLA in 1994. She was a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, the pre-eminent speech and reading laboratory in the country. Byrd came to USC in 1998, and is director of the USC Phonetics Laboratory.
She studies speech production. She has won the R. Bruce Lindsay Award, presented by the Acoustical Society of America to a member under 35 years of age who has contributed substantially to the advancement of theoretical or applied acoustics. Byrd is an editorial board member of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association and an editor of Journal of Phonetics.
Lamy earned a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Denver in 1980. His areas of expertise include international relations theory and foreign policy analysis with an emphasis on Western European states, the U.S. and Canada. He came to USC in 1983.
He has published more than 40 articles and book chapters, and is co-author of a textbook to be published by McGraw-Hill. Lamy has served as director and deputy director of the College’s School of International Relations. He has received 18 awards for excellence in teaching, including honorary membership in the USC Mortar Board Honor Society, and has directed the Center for Excellence in Teaching.
McCann graduated from UC Santa Cruz and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. He has taught at Harvard University and MIT, and also served on the visiting faculty at UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Irvine and Claremont Graduate University. He came to USC in 1983.
He was director of the College’s School of Philosophy from 1997 to 2000 and president of the USC Academic Senate in 2003-04. McCann has received numerous teaching honors, including the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching. His research focus is the history of 17th and 18th century philosophy, and particularly the connections then between philosophy and science.
Gillman also announced the reappointment of David Román, professor of English and of American studies and ethnicity, as director of faculty development. Gillman noted that Román for the past two years “has done remarkable work in mentoring junior faculty and showcasing faculty innovation. David will continue to expand our efforts in these areas.”
Román received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1990. He has taught at Yale and the University of Washington, Seattle. He came to the College in 1995.
He has received several USC teaching awards, including a Mellon Award for Excellence in Mentoring for his work as director of faculty development. His research focuses on theatre studies with an emphasis on contemporary U.S. culture, as well as American, Latino and queer studies. He has written and edited books about AIDS, Latino studies and contemporary culture. He is researching a book on racial politics in 1940s American theatre and memoirs of pre-Stonewall gay and lesbian activists.