Sally Pratt, a professor and vice provost for graduate programs at the University of Southern California, was named chair of the board of the Council of Graduate Schools. The Council of Graduate Schools is an organization of approximately 500 institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada engaged in graduate education, research, and the preparation of candidates for advanced degrees. The organization’s mission is to improve and advance graduate education, which it accomplishes through advocacy in the federal policy arena, research, and the development and dissemination of best practices.
Dr. Pratt oversees the Graduate School at the University of Southern California, which has administrative responsibility for all of the university’s Ph.D. programs and select master’s programs. A professor of Slavic languages and literatures, she came to the university in 1980 as the Russian language program coordinator. From 1997 until 2005, she served as dean of academic programs for the university’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, with responsibility for graduate and undergraduate programs. Earlier in her career, Dr. Pratt taught at Oberlin College in Ohio.
Professor Pratt received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian poetry, and she has published three books: The Semantics of Chaos in Tiutchev (Peter Lang International, 1983), Russian Metaphysical Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev and Boratynskii (Stanford University Press, 1984), and Nikolai Zabolotsky: Enigma and Cultural Paradigm (Northwestern University Press, 2000).