Deans and Administrators

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Joseph Aoun

Dean, College of Letters, Arts & Sciences
University of Southern California

Dean of the USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences
Anna H. Bing Professor

Joseph Aoun joined the USC faculty a year after receiving his Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. He was elected president of the Academic Senate in 1993. After a six-year term as the dean of faculty of the USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences, and then a term as the College's vice dean in 1999, Aoun was named the 19th dean of the College in July 2000 and became the inaugural holder of the Anna H. Bing Dean's Chair.

An internationally known scholar in linguistics, Aoun has made major contributions to his field. He has published seven books and has written more than 40 articles. In addition, he has lectured at many of the leading universities in the United States, Canada and Europe. In 1997, he received the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship, USC's highest distinction in research.

USC College, which was established when the University was founded in 1880, is the largest of USC's 19 academic schools. It is home to more than 30 academic departments, programs and centers; and houses nearly 500 full-time faculty, including 60 who hold endowed chairs and professorships. The College is the liberal arts center of the University, teaching more than 10,000 undergraduate students. It has graduate students enrolled in more than 20 Ph.D. programs, and serves as a primary center for research in the basic sciences, humanities and social sciences.

Under Aoun's leadership, the College has set it sights on becoming one of the top 10 private colleges in the nation. To this end, the College has launched several major initiatives, including an effort to gain 100 new senior faculty with interdisciplinary credentials. The College also has intensified its growth in the life sciences, strengthened its programs in earth sciences and earthquake research, and launched an entirely new field called geobiology. While continuing the College's emphasis on neuroscience, molecular and computational biology and marine biology, Aoun has brought new vigor to urban studies, global studies, economics, art history and the
humanities.

Within USC, Aoun has formed numerous synergistic arrangements and organized research units. University collaborations include the new USC Center on Public Diplomacy a joint center with the USC Annenberg School of Communication; a joint institute with College faculty and faculty from the USC Gerontology School to study the scientific and sociologic domains of aging; and two joint centers with the USC Law School: the USC Center for Law History and Culture and the Center for Law Economics and Organization. Aoun launched with the School of Engineering a High Performance Computing Center, attracting an entire computer science and physics group to USC.

Externally, Aoun has capitalized on USC's Southern California location to build upon existing partnerships and create new ones. SCEC, the Southern California Earthquake Center, was energized when Aoun recruited a top rank earth sciences leader to USC. The center now includes 14 core institutions from across the nation plus 25 participating institutions in the world's most important resource for studying earthquakes.

Under Aoun's leadership, two partnerships were inaugurated with the Huntington Library in San Marino, California: the USC-Huntington Institute for Early Modern Studies and the Huntington-USC Research Institute on California and the American West.

To further an emerging field in art history, Aoun helped create a partnership between the College and the Getty Research Institute to study the "Collecting Display and the History of Taste." He is currently building a partnership with the Shoah Visual History Foundation to create a center for the study of visual history. Recognizing the study of museums can no longer by limited to the local or national experience, Aoun created the International Institute for Advanced Museum Studies.

Hebrew Union College has a longstanding relationship with the College, and under Aoun's guidance joint projects have been created with the Center for Religion and Civic Culture and the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. Aoun recently worked to establish the USC Francophone Resource Center to promote the study of French language and francophone cultures in the U.S.

There are several dozen of these types of ventures in the College, bridging disciplines across the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences.