Announcing the Interim Dean of Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences

June 26, 2024

Dear Members of the Georgetown University Community:

On behalf of President DeGioia, I write to announce that Andrew Sobanet, Ph.D., has been appointed Interim Dean of Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences. He will begin in this position on July 1, 2024. 

Dr. Sobanet is a Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies. Since January 2021, he has served as Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Arts & Sciences. Having joined the Georgetown faculty in 2002, he has worked in a variety of leadership roles on the Hilltop, including seven years as chair of the Department of French and Francophone Studies. He is on the core faculty of the Program in Global and Comparative Literature, an affiliate faculty member of the Program in Film and Media Studies, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Center for Jewish Civilization in the School of Foreign Service. 

As vice dean, Professor Sobanet has overseen a dozen departments in the College of Arts & Sciences, as well as the College Rank & Tenure Committee, the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, and the Faculty of Literatures, Cultures, and Language Studies. He was part of a team that created the new joint degree in International Business, Language, and Culture, and he was recently appointed as the liaison between the College of Arts & Sciences and Georgetown’s campus in Qatar.  

Professor Sobanet is the author of two books: Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) and Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality (Indiana University Press, 2018).  He has also published widely on Vichy France.  Professor Sobanet is the editor of Revisioning French Culture (Liverpool University Press, 2019) and several special issues of scholarly journals. Most recently, as a faculty affiliate of the Massive Data Institute in Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, he has been part of a research team analyzing political discourse in French-language social media.

For nearly fifteen years, Professor Sobanet chaired the steering committee of the 20th and 21st-Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium, the flagship annual scholarly conference in his field. He has also served as associate editor of Contemporary French Civilization since 2011.

Professor Sobanet received a B.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Please join me in welcoming Andrew to the role of Interim Dean as we plan for a national search for Dean Rosario Ceballo’s successor.  

Sincerely,

Robert M. Groves, Provost