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Colatrella and Murray Named Associate Deans for Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts

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Dean Jacqueline J. Royster has named Carol Colatrella as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Janet Murray as Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs.  Both are professors in the Ivan Allen College School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC).

The appointments restructure responsibilities previously combined under the position of Associate Dean for Research/Faculty Development, a role held by Susan Cozzens, who moved to the position of Georgia Tech Vice Provost of Graduate Education and Faculty Affairs on June 1.

Carol Colatrella - Associate Dean for Graduate Studies

Dr. Colatrella is a two-time Fulbright scholar and an award-winning teacher who is active in programmatic and administrative roles both on campus and externally.

She is a long-time co-director of the Georgia Tech Center for the Study of Women, Science, and Technology (WST), which is part of the Office of the Vice President for Institute Diversity. WST sponsors technical and scholarly presentations, career development workshops, and focused research programs, and coordinates mentoring networks for faculty and students, including the WST Learning Community.  From 2005 to 2007, she served as program director of the Georgia Tech-National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program.

Colatrella received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University. Her research ranges across nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European literary, historical, and scientific narratives, particularly those emphasizing moral transgression and social marginality.  Her scholarly work is strongly interdisciplinary and has been funded by national and international foundations. She held Fulbright fellowships based in Denmark in 2000 and in 2005-06, during the latter working with an international group of scholars. Other fellowships include a Nunn School European Union Center Grant for 2010-11 and a residency at Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin in June 2008. Colatrella has co-edited two books and authored and/or co-authored 35 book chapters and articles and three books, most recently Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology (The Ohio State University Press, 2011).

Since 1993, she has served as executive director of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. She is a manuscript reviewer for a number of journals, including the Journal of Narrative Technique, the Journal of Technology Transfer, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and for presses, including the University Press of Florida and the Modern Language Association. 

Colatrella was recognized in 2007 with Georgia Tech’s Geoffrey G. Eicholz Faculty Teaching Award and in 2005 with Georgia Tech’s Outstanding Service Award. She supervises graduate research assistants and undergraduate research projects. 

Janet Murray - Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs

A primary focus for Janet Murray as Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs will be to cultivate and mentor faculty research and foster connections with research efforts in other Georgia Tech colleges.  She will work to further expand Ivan Allen College’s top-ranked $6M annual portfolio in humanities and social sciences sponsored research.

An IAC Dean’s Professor, Murray is a prominent scholar in the field of digital media and the application of digital technology in education, scholarship, entertainment, and art.  She directed LCC’s top-ranked Graduate Program in Digital Media from 1999 through 2011, during which she established the program as a national and international curricular model for a humanistic approach to the design of digital media.

During the course of her career, Murray has secured more than $4.5 million in research funding by a wide range of private and public sources including IBM, Apple Computer, the Annenberg-CPB Project, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation.  Through the Experimental Television Laboratory which she directs, Murray has developed research partnerships with PBS, ABC, MTV, Turner,Motorola, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel Corporation, the American Film Institute and other media innovators. She is a member of the interdisciplinary GVU Center and has worked closely with researchers at GTRI, GCATT, and in the College of Engineering where she was co-PI on an NSF project that created innovative computer-based exercises for learning Statics.

Murray holds a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University, and before coming to Georgia Tech taught humanities and led advanced interactive design projects at MIT.  Her books Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, and Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (both published by MIT Press) are widely used as foundational texts in media studies and HCI.

She is a member of Georgia Tech's interdisciplinary GVU Center. She helped develop Georgia Tech’s program in Women in Science and Technology and supported implementation of the ADVANCE program on campus.  She has served on the IAC Dean’s Promotion and Tenure Committee and the Provost’s Task Force for Interdisciplinary Study. From 2000-2009, she served as a trustee of the American Film Institute and is currently on the board for the George Foster Peabody Award. In 2010 Murray was named one of the "Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future" by Prospect Magazine.

Dr. Murray assumes her new role July 1st. Dr. Colatrella will begin in her new position August 15th. 

Status

  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Rebecca Keane
  • Created:06/28/2012
  • Modified By:Fletcher Moore
  • Modified:10/07/2016

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