Arts And Humanities Dean Term Extended

Dean Thornton Dill term extended to June 30, 2016.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Arts and Humanities Dean Bonnie Thornton Dill, who heads one of the University of Maryland’s largest colleges, will serve an additional three year term.  Originally appointed to serve through this June, her term will now extend through June 30, 2016.

“Dr. Thornton Dill has proven to be a strong and effective advocate for the arts and humanities, while at the same time, bringing an entrepreneurial and creative spirit to her college,” says University of Maryland Senior Vice President and Provost Mary Ann Rankin. “Bonnie has actively pursued new interdisciplinary research partnerships and grants, intensified innovative approaches to global engagement, stressed excellence through diversity, and expanded opportunities for students to apply their skills and knowledge to the solution of real-world problems.”

During their recent transition, Rankin and her predecessor, Ann Wylie, offered to extend the Dean’s two-year appointment to a full five-year term.

In her first full year leading Arts and Humanities, Dean Thornton Dill has shepherded 18 candidates through tenure and promotion, hired 20 new faculty members, presided over far-reaching leadership transitions, and worked to improve communication and cohesion.

“The skills we teach are the skills employers seek in the 21^st century,” says Dean Thornton Dill, stressing the vital importance of the arts and humanities. “I like to remind people that a distinctive strength of the U.S. system of higher education has been the practice of educating all students broadly – teaching the ‘whole person.’”

 Thornton Dill is internationally recognized for her scholarship on race and gender, Black and Latina women in higher education, as well as issues such as work, family, and poverty. She led Women's Studies at Maryland to national prominence.  It is, for example, one of a select few universities in the United States to offer a doctoral degree in the field and serves as the base for the National Women's Studies Association and editorial home of the pioneering journal, Feminist Studies.