Williams Appointed Associate Dean For Faculty Affairs

History Prof Daryle Williams appointed Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in UMD's College of Arts and Humanities.

By Natalie Kornicks

Dean Bonnie Thornton Dill has announced the appointment of Daryle Williams as the new Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Arts and Humanities.

Williams will succeed Associate Dean Charles Rutherford, with whom he will share the position at fifty percent from July 1, 2013, through December 31, 2013.

“Daryle brings a strong record of research and scholarship along with a variety of administrative experience to this critically important role,” said Dean Thornton Dill.

Working closely with the dean, faculty and administrators, Williams will be responsible for insuring that faculty interests and needs are known, represented and addressed. Specifically he will lead, advise and support faculty affairs as related to appointments, promotion and tenure; faculty mentorship and professional development; faculty diversity; as well as policy and processes for both unit and unit head reviews.

Williams says he is eager “to reach out to the college to know faculty and understand where they are, to understand their achievements and concerns, and to help advance their success as scholars, teachers and members of the university community.”

Willams has taught in the Department of History at the University of Maryland since 1994. In addition to his teaching contributions to history and the Latin American studies certificate program, he served as director of the Committee on Africa and the Americas, associate director of the David C. Driskell Center, and director of graduate studies in history.

A scholar of modern Latin America, Williams’ research specialty is Brazil. His first monograph, “Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945,” won the American Historical Association's prize for the best book in Latin American or Iberian history. He is now working towards the completion of a second book, “The Broken Paths of Freedom: The Free Africans of the Slave Ship Cezar and Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Slave Society.” Williams is co-editor of “The Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Politics, and Culture” and a senior editor for the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography. In support of this record of research and publication, he has held fellowships and grants from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Fulbright program and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

He earned a Ph.D. and M.A. from Stanford University and a B.A. from Princeton University, all in history.