Executive Vice Chancellor David Marshall will deliver the keynote address. Credit: Spencer Bruttig, Office of Public Affairs and CommunicationsThe Graduate Division is delighted to announce that Executive Vice Chancellor David Marshall will be the keynote speaker for the Graduate Division's 2015 Commencement ceremony on June 14 at 4 p.m. on the Faculty Club Green.
Dr. Marshall assumed the position of Executive Vice Chancellor in September 2014 after an extensive national search. This appointment followed many years of distinguished academic leadership as Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts; he is also a professor of English and Comparative Literature.
Dr. Marshall received his B.A. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The Johns Hopkins University. He then went on to a professorial appointment at Yale, where he served as Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, Chair of the English Department, Director of the Literature Major, and Acting Chair of Comparative Literature, among other appointments. A Guggenheim Fellow, his research focuses on 18th-century fiction, aesthetics, and moral philosophy. He is the author of four books and numerous essays on Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, Lennox, Mackenzie, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Hume, and Rilke, among others. His 2005 book, “The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750-1815,” was awarded the prestigious Louis Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
The Graduate Division's Commencement keynote speaker, UC Santa Barbara Executive Vice Chancellor David Marshall, 'is an erudite scholar, a brilliant speaker, and has a remarkable view of higher education in our 21st-century landscape. It is sure to be a rich and thought-provoking speech!'
– Graduate Division Dean Carol Genetti
Dr. Marshall joined the UC Santa Barbara faculty in 1998 as Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, (later endowed as the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts), a position that he held for 16 years. For seven of these years, he also served as the Executive Dean of the College of Letters and Science. Through these positions, Dr. Marshall served to significantly shape the interdisciplinary landscape of UC Santa Barbara. One example of this is his creation of the Carsey-Wolf Center for Film and New Media, including its Environmental Media Initiative, which brings together faculty and students from the humanities, social sciences, marine sciences, and the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. He is especially interested in supporting efforts in sustainability and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara, “where we have strengths in almost every discipline across campus,” he said.
Dr. Marshall is nationally recognized for his ardent advocacy of the public university, liberal arts education, and the humanities and arts. He serves as President of the Board of the National Humanities Alliance, which advances humanities policy in the areas of research, education, preservation, and public programs; he was also past Chair of the University of California President’s Advisory Committee on Research in the Humanities, which oversees the UC Humanities Network.
"I am delighted to bring our new Executive Vice Chancellor to the Graduate Division Commencement ceremony,” said Graduate Division Dean Carol Genetti. “I have had the honor of working with him in the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts and as Dean of the Graduate Division, but I recognize that there are many people on this campus who don’t know him and have not had a chance to hear him speak, and this is especially true of our graduate students. They are in for a treat: He is an erudite scholar, a brilliant speaker, and has a remarkable view of higher education in our 21st-century landscape. It is sure to be a rich and thought-provoking speech!”
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You can hear Dr. Marshall’s address on June 14 at the Graduate Division’s Commencement ceremony, which begins at 4 p.m. on the Faculty Club Green. For those unable to attend, the ceremony will be live-streamed at the UCSB Commencement Live Webcast page. More information about Commencement may be found on the Graduate Division’s Commencement page. Also, you may read the Office of Public Affairs and Communications’ article “Here Comes Commencement” for a roundup of all the Commencement ceremonies. Don’t forget to use the hashtag #UCSB2015 on your social media photos and other posts to be featured on the Webcast page.