Anna Westerstahl Stenport will be the next dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, according to a UGA Media Relations release.
Stenport will assume the role of dean of Franklin College on June 1, succeeding Alan Dorsey, who will return to the faculty after being dean of the college since 2012.
As the dean of Franklin College, Stenport will oversee 30 departments in the five divisions of humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, fine arts and physical and mathematical sciences. 30 research centers, programs and institutes are also housed in Franklin College, home to more than 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students as well as more than 860 full-time faculty, the release said.
Stenport has served as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology, RIT since September 2021 and will join UGA faculty as the University of Georgia Athletic Association Professor in Communication Studies on April 1, 2023, pending approval of the Board of Regents for the University System of Georgia, according to the release.
Stenport studied at UGA as an international student during her first year of college as part of a scholarship from the Georgia Rotary Student Program, the release said.
Before her time at RIT, Stenport was a part of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s faculty, serving as a professor of global studies and chair of the School of Modern Languages in the university’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, where she founded and co-directed the Atlanta Global Studies Center, the release said.
Stenport has published 10 books and edited more than 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has worked a scholar, professor and director at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, been a visiting professor and Anna Lindh Fellow at Stanford University as well as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Queen’s University in Canada as well as the University of Gothenburg, Stockholm University, the Danish Film Institute and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, according to the release.
She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Uppsala University in Sweden and holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley, the release said.
