Dear fellow member of the Columbia community:
On behalf of President Lee Bollinger, I am pleased to announce that Carlos J. Alonso, the Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor in the Humanities will be the interim Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, beginning September 1, 2010. Carlos was recruited to Columbia from the University of Pennsylvania to chair the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies. Over the past five years he has spearheaded a renewal of the department, restoring it to its proper place among the top three departments in the nation.
Carlos specializes in 19th- and 20th-century Latin American intellectual history and cultural production, and in contemporary literary and cultural theory. He is the author of Modernity and Autochthony: The Spanish American Regional Novel (Cambridge UP), The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (Oxford UP), and editor of Julio Cortázar: New Readings (Cambridge UP). He was editor of PMLA, the scholarly journal of the Modern Language Association of America, during 2000-2003. He is also the current editor of the Revista Hispánica Moderna, published by the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. Under his editorship the Revista received the 2009 Council of Editors of Learned Journals' Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement.
Carlos was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and received his BA from Cornell University and his PhD from Yale. His exemplary service in Columbia committees, including the Academic Review Committee, the Faculty Budget Group, the Steering Committee of the Chairs, and the Executive Committee of GSAS, have prepared him well to guide the Graduate School during a time of transition.
Sincerely,
Nicholas B. Dirks
Franz Boas Professor of History and Anthropology
Executive Vice President for the Arts and Sciences
Dean of the Faculty, Columbia University