Dr. Alain-Philippe Durand, is the Dorrance Dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona, He is a Professor of French, and affiliated faculty in Africana Studies, Applied Intercultural Arts Research, Latin American Studies, LGBT Studies, and Public and Applied.
Dean Durand has made a mission of building enrollment in French, then in Humanities majors at large, and in connecting those forms of study to careers and jobs across disciplines and beyond university life. While a French professor at the University of Rhode Island, he grew the number of French majors from 20 (in 2000) to 160 (in 2013). After he became Dean of Humanities at Arizona, he oversaw the growth of Humanities majors there by 33% between 2016 and 2023. Our university community is diverse and, overall, very “liberal arts” in its affiliation with our university and its work on campus and in the world. Durand’s proactive work in spreading the pragmatic and very concrete message about the importance of humanities in all fields of endeavor should resonate loudly among a good number of our academic departments, student cohorts, and in the Madison community itself–which is full of humanists doing all kinds of work in the world after they finish college.
Full Bio: https://french.arizona.edu/people/adurand
If you have questions, please email Ritt Deitz, mdeitz@wisc.edu