Dean and Executive Vice President

Amy Hungerford, the Ruth Fulton Benedict Professor of English and Comparative Literature, is Dean and Executive Vice President of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In that role she is responsible, among other things, for nurturing the excellence of the faculty who teach undergraduate and graduate students, and for ensuring Columbia’s standing as a great research university across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. 

As Dean and Executive Vice President of Columbia’s second largest administrative unit, Dean Hungerford has prioritized the recruitment of exceptional new faculty, enhanced the student experience for undergraduates, and extended Columbia’s vital research enterprise into important new areas. Among her achievements, she has supported programs to bolster faculty development; invested in new research labs and renovated campus spaces; created new opportunities for student and faculty collaboration across the University; improved faculty governance and administrative processes; served as the academic lead for major fundraising efforts; and developed a new strategic vision for the Arts and Sciences to guide its teaching and research for the next decade. 

A scholar of 20th and 21st century American literature, Professor Hungerford’s first two monographs explore literary engagements with genocide and with religion in the 20th century. Her most recent book, Making Literature Now, examines how social networks—both virtual and traditional—shape contemporary writers’ creative choices and the choices we make about reading. Her current research and writing is about the sociable qualities of solitude. 

As a devoted teacher and graduate mentor, Professor Hungerford trained a generation of Ph.D. and master’s degree students who now work in higher education, high school teaching, and publishing. Her open-access online course, “The American Novel Since 1945” has been enjoyed by learners around the world since it was recorded in 2008. She teaches regularly in the Core Curriculum. 

In the early 2000’s Prof. Hungerford was part of the founding collective for Post45, one of the first professional associations for scholars working in post-45 literary and cultural studies. She co-founded and was site editor of post45.org, an open-access journal publishing peer reviewed and general interest work in the field. 

Dean Hungerford joined Columbia as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in January of 2020 after twenty years at Yale, where she served in various roles, including Head of an undergraduate residential college and Dean of Humanities. In five years as Dean of Humanities, she oversaw significant hiring across the division and led planning for a renovated Humanities building at the center of campus.