Curran Appointed Dean of Arts and Humanities

Andrew Curran,  professor of romance languages and literatures, has been appointed to serve as the next Dean of Arts and Humanities. It is a three-year appointment which begins in July.

Since coming to Wesleyan in 1998, Curran’s contribution has been substantial: he is currently vice-chair of Advisory and has been serving on Advisory since fall 2008. He has twice served as head of the French section of his department, and has served on many committees including international studies, the CHUM advisory board, the CSPL advisory board, the EPC task force on the capabilities, faculty-student affairs, and the library committee. He has also twice served as resident director of the Vassar-Wesleyan program in Paris. In addition, Curran is organizing this spring’s Shasha Seminar on Human Concerns.

Curran’s scholarly interests focus on the early-modern life sciences. He is the editor of Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Eighteenth-Century Life, 1997) and author of Sublime Disorder (Voltaire Foundation: University of Oxford, 2001) and The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). A fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, Curran has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He has served on the editorial board of Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture and Diderot Studies, and on the executive board of the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Curran will be following Kirsha Winston, Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature, professor of environmental studies, who is concluding a four-year term in the position.