Georgetown College Appoints Andrew Sobanet to Vice Dean of Faculty
Georgetown College is delighted to announce that Department of French and Francophone Studies professor Andrew Sobanet has been chosen to serve as Vice Dean of Faculty. He was selected for this role as Soyica Diggs Colbert assumes her role as Interim Dean of the College in January 2020.
“It is an honor to serve the College as Vice Dean of Faculty and I very much look forward to working with everyone in the Dean’s office, as well as the department chairs, program directors and faculty across the arts and sciences,” Sobanet says. “Service to the community has always been an important part of my career at Georgetown and I look forward to deepening my engagement with the College and the campus at large.”
About Sobanet
Sobanet’s research interests, which examine the intersection of politics and literature, include the twentieth-century novel, testimony, mass media, and European history. He is the author of Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland and the Cult of Personality (Indiana University Press, 2018). He has also published widely on Vichy France.
He has worked as the associate editor of the journal Contemporary French Civilization since 2011 and served as chair of the Department of French and Francophone studies from 2009 to 2015 and again in 2018-19. Sobanet was also the convenor of Georgetown’s Faculty of Languages and Linguistics in 2014-15.
The professor is currently serving as chair of the College Rank and Tenure Committee, an advisory body to the university president regarding the granting of tenure and promotion. His most recent projects include research on the cultural history of communism in France as well as a collaborative big-data project with Lisa Singh in the Department of Computer Science that examines political discourse on French-language Twitter.
As vice dean, Sobanet will be responsible for Foreign Languages and Linguistics departments including Arabic and Islamic Studies, Classics, East Asian Languages and Cultures, French and Francophone Studies, German, Italian, Linguistics, Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic Languages and Small Program Languages. Sobanet will also oversee African American Studies, Art and Art History, English and Performing Arts.
Additionally, Sobanet will supervise the Comparative Literature, Film and Media Studies, Global Medieval Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies programs.
Diggs Colbert, who will assume her role as interim dean of the College on January 1 of 2021, says that Sobanet’s demonstrated skill set will be an asset in the continued development of the College.
“I am excited Prof. Andrew Sobanet, an outstanding scholar, gifted teacher, and proven leader, will be joining the Dean’s office as a vice dean of faculty,” Diggs Colbert says. “Professor Sobanet’s vast leadership experience will help guide the College in implementing ongoing and new initiatives that harmonize well with the wonderful work of our existing team.”
-by Shelby Roller (G’19)