Dean Sonia Hirt elected to A2RU Executive Committee

UGA CED is proud to announce that Dean Sonia Hirt has been elected to the Executive Committee of The Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru). According to its website, the Alliance is a partnership of colleges and universities “committed to transforming higher education to ensure the greatest possible institutional support for arts-integrative research, curricula, programs and creative practice between the arts, sciences, and other disciplines.” It supports “the growing body of high-quality scholarly and creative production most attainable when disciplines are free to experiment within and across their boundaries.” The organization was founded in 2012 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and has since established partnerships with many prestigious higher-education institutions such as MIT, Penn State, Princeton, RISD, Rutgers, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Virginia Tech and, of course our own University of Georgia!

As a member of the Executive Committee, Dean Hirt hopes to work toward strategies to improve application recruitment and admission to increase diversity among arts students at various institutions. She also aims to improve practices in recruitment, retention, and promotion and tenure for faculty in the arts and arts-related disciplines, as well as expanding the definition of arts research as a whole.