University of Utah Dean Stepping Down to Take Major Humanities Post at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Dianne S. Harris, dean of the College of Humanities and a professor of history at the University of Utah since 2015, will be leaving the university to take on the duties as senior program officer in higher education and scholarships in the humanities at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York City. As a senior program officer, Harris will work on a range of grants and research initiatives supporting undergraduate and doctoral education, advanced scholarship, and the public humanities.

Before joining the faculty at the University of Utah, Dr. Harris was a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois. She also served as the director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Dr. Harris is the author of several books including The Nature of Authority: Villa Culture, Landscape, and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003) and Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

In accepting the appointment, Dr. Harris said that “Joining the Mellon Foundation is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to support the humanities in higher education at an unparalleled scale, and at a time when doing so feels especially urgent. I’m profoundly grateful for the opportunity to join the foundation, and I look forward to supporting its important work in the United States and beyond.”