Sarah Cole Appointed Dean of the School of the Arts

June 25, 2024

Dear fellow members of the Columbia community:

It is with great pleasure that I share with you my appointment of Sarah Cole as Dean of the School of the Arts, effective immediately. Sarah has been serving as Interim Dean since last fall with incredible vision, commitment, and heart. We are delighted to make this appointment permanent.

As Interim Dean, Professor Cole has excelled, setting a strategic vision for the School that charts a course for a new era. In so doing, she has benefitted from her deep knowledge of Columbia and its people, especially its School of the Arts community. Her oversight over the School’s four departments (Film, Theatre, Visual and Sound Arts, and Writing), the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Miller Theatre, and the more than 1,500 students, faculty, and staff has been exceptional. We could not be more confident in her talents, her judgement, and her leadership as the School advances and expands its mission in the months and years ahead.

Sarah’s tenure as Interim Dean has been bolstered by her extensive experience in leadership roles at Columbia. From 2018 until her appointment as Interim Dean, she served as Dean of Humanities in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, responsible for 13 academic departments and 16 interdisciplinary centers and institutes. For all the Humanities units, she directed hiring, promotion, and retention; faculty affairs; diversity, equity and inclusion; and worked closely with Columbia College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of General Studies, the School of the Arts, Barnard College, and the Office of the Provost on shared initiatives, among many other responsibilities. Prior to her service as Dean of Humanities, Sarah was Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Sarah is an expert in literary modernism and teaches a wide array of topics in 19th and 20th century literature, including war and violence, the body and sexuality, Irish literature, and the works of Woolf, Eliot, Wells, Joyce, and others. She is also the co-founder of the NYNJ Modernism Seminar, and founder of the Humanities War and Peace Initiative and the Climate Humanities Initiative in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of three celebrated books, Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth CenturyAt the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland, and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War. She is the recipient of numerous accolades for her work, including a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her BA from Williams College.

I want to extend my deep thanks to all the members of the search committee who worked so hard to deliver this excellent result. Please join me in congratulating Sarah and wishing her all the best as she takes on this role.

Sincerely,

Minouche Shafik
President, Columbia University in the City of New York