Date: May 26, 2022
TO: The NYU Community
FROM: NYU President Andrew Hamilton

I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Georgina Dopico — whose scholarly work focuses on the literature, history, and culture of early-modern Spain — as Interim Provost, effective August 1.

Many of you will already know Gigi, who has been a faculty member in Arts & Science’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures since 2000. She is widely admired for her scholarship, her collegiality, her openness to the ideas of others, her ability to bring people together to solve a challenge, her sense of humor and her knack for setting others at ease, her sensitivity to faculty concerns, her focus on student achievement, and her work ethic.

Gigi is exceptionally well-qualified to take on the assignment as the University’s Interim Chief Academic Officer. Since 2018, she has served in a number of positions in the Provost’s Office, most recently as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, where, in partnership with deans, she oversees undergraduate and graduate academics for NYU’s 13 undergraduate schools and 20 graduate schools and programs. She has been a member of the University’s Senior Leadership Team since 2016, when she was named A&S’s Dean for the Humanities. As a vice provost, she was an indispensable member of the University’s COVID response effort, developing and implementing unprecedented flexibility in the academic calendar for students, determining course modalities, leading academic policy changes, helping to manage the effort to align classroom scheduling with physical distancing requirements, and assisting with the development of faculty resources for remote and blended teaching, among other important measures. Outside of COVID, she has created and launched the University-wide common reading effort, NYU Reads; led the University-wide effort to overhaul student course evaluations; led an academic integrity effort to reduce student plagiarism and cheating; and created NYU x NYU, an effort to create an academic and curricular pathway between NYU’s undergraduate schools and our graduate and professional schools and thereby improve access and affordability. As Dean for the Humanities, she created the Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Labs; created the First Book Publishing Colloquium for faculty; launched a Community College Transfer Opportunity Program for CAS; helped design and implement FAS’s initial Diversity Hiring Initiative; launched programs to strengthen enrollments in the Humanities, and — in line with the University’s affordability efforts — developed three-year pathways to graduation in Humanities departments.

She is the author of Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain; Unstable Anatomies: Bodies and Theaters of Proof; and numerous articles. She is co-editor of three scholarly volumes and served as Coordinating Editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies from 2006 to 2015. Among the many honors Gigi has received were research fellowships from Spain’s Ministry of Culture, the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for her first book, a Dirección General del Libro award for her first edition of a 17th Century dictionary, the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize, and a Whitney Humanities Center Fellowship at Yale. She received her undergraduate degree, cum laude, from Harvard, and her MA, MPhil, and PhD — all with highest honors — from Yale, where she was on the faculty before coming to NYU.

Please join me in congratulating Gigi and thanking her for taking on this vitally important role, in which she has agreed to stay until the appointment of a provost by my successor. I have every confidence that she will do a superb job.