Rogers Smith Named Associate Dean for the Social Sciences

Steven Fluharty, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, has announced the appointment of Rogers Smith as Associate Dean for the Social Sciences, effective July 1, 2014. In his new role, Smith will oversee the Departments of Anthropology, Criminology, Economics, History and Sociology of Science, Political Science, and Sociology, as well as several research centers.

Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, with a secondary appointment in the Graduate School of Education. He is a renowned scholar of constitutional law, American political thought, and modern legal and political theory, with special interests in questions of citizenship, race, ethnicity and gender. Smith has authored or co-authored six volumes, including Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama's America (with Desmond S. King; Princeton, 2011) and Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (Yale, 1997), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Smith is also recognized as an outstanding educator who has received the University's Lindback Award and the SAS Dean's Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Research, and has just been named one of this year's winners of the Provost's Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring.

Smith served as Chair of the Department of Political Science from 2003 to 2006. In 2006 he founded, and has since chaired, the Penn Program for Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism. He is also Co-Chair of the Advisory Council of the Teacher's Institute of Philadelphia, a collaboration between Penn and the School District of Philadelphia. In announcing Smith’s appointment, Fluharty said, “That Rogers is an expert on citizenship is no coincidence. He has long been a pillar of the SAS academic community whose record of achievement positions him extremely well to lead the School's social sciences programs at this time.”

Smith succeeds Susan Lindee, who will return to research and teaching in the Department of History and Sociology of Science, with a stop first in Japan, where she will spend next fall as a visiting professor at the University of Hiroshima. “Susan has been an incredible asset to the Dean's office team who has worked tirelessly over the past three years on behalf of our social science departments,” says Fluharty.