Leadership - Office of the Dean

Miller

Tyrus Miller


Dean, School of Humanities humanitiesdean@uci.edu

Tyrus Miller is Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He brings to the position more than twenty years as an interdisciplinary scholar in the humanities; extensive administrative experience in a variety of roles from undergraduate liberal education to graduate education to institutional management; and a rich engagement with humanities research as a scholar and strategic university leader. Prior to his coming to UCI, he served as Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies and as Co-Provost of Cowell College at UC Santa Cruz, and as the Director of the UC Education Abroad Program’s Study Center in Budapest, Hungary. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Stanford University, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University, and a concurrent B.A./M.A. in Humanities from Johns Hopkins. He is an internationally recognized scholar of 20th-century art, literature, and culture, with a specialization in the innovative modernist and avant-garde literary and artistic movements of Europe and the United States. In addition, he has written extensively on the art and culture of socialist and post-socialist East-Central Europe. His publications encompass diverse but interconnected interests in literature, cultural and social theory, philosophy, film studies, and visual and performing arts.  He is author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars; Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde; Time Images: Alternative Temporalities in 20th-Century Theory, History, and Art; and Modernism and the Frankfurt School. He has edited Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context and A Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis. He is also the translator from Hungarian and editor of György Lukács, The Culture of People’s Democracy: Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition and series co-editor of Brill Publisher’s Lukács Library series.

Warminski

Andrzej Warminski


Associate Dean for Academic Personnel ajwarmin@uci.edu

Professor of English Andrzej Warminski works on literary theory and its history, British romantic literature, German 19th and 20th century philosophy, and its reception in French thought. Most recently he has published two volumes of essays: Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory (2013) and Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De Man (2013). At present, he is writing a book on crucial moments in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and their implications for current theoretical debates. Before coming to UCI, he taught at Northwestern University and Yale University. Born in Gdańsk, Poland, Warminski earned his bachelor’s degree at Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale University.

Chen

Yong Chen


Associate Dean for Curriculum and Student Services y3chen@uci.edu

Yong Chen is Professor of History and Chancellor’s Fellow at UCI, where he served as the Associate Dean in the Office of Research and Graduate Studies (1999-2004).  He is the author of Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America (Columbia University Press, 2014); Chinese San Francisco 1850-1943 (Stanford, 2000) and The Chinese in San Francisco (Peking University Press, 2009), and co-editor of New Perspectives on American History (Hebei People’s Publishing House, 2010).  He was also the co-curator of “‘Have You Eaten Yet?’: The Chinese Restaurant in America” in Atwater Kent Museum, Philadelphia (2006), and the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, New York City (2004–05).  He serves on the National Landmarks Committee of the advisory board of the National Park Service of the United States.

Wu

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu


Faculty Director, Humanities Center j.wu@uci.edu

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor of Asian American studies and a Chancellor's Fellow at UCI. Her research and teaching focus on analyzing intersecting social hierarchies, such as those based on race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. She is particularly interested in understanding how individuals form identities and navigate/protest social inequalities. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. history from Stanford University and joined the UCI faculty in 2015. She authored Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: the Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005) (Click here to see a digital narrative about this remarkable woman);Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Cornell University Press, 2013). Her current book project, a collaboration with political scientist Gwendolyn Mink, explores the political career of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color U.S. congressional representative and the namesake for Title IX. Wu also co-edited Women's America: Refocusing the Past, 8th Edition (Oxford 2015), Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (Brill 2017), and Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies (2012-2017). She is the current co-editor of Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (Alexander Street Press) and the editor for Amerasia Journal (Taylor and Francis). Wu is an award-winning mentor and teacher who utilizes oral histories and digital media to include new voices and tell stories in new formats that engage the public.

Willoughby-Herard

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is an associate professor of African American studies as well as a faculty affiliate in the Departments of Political Science and Global and International Studies, Comparative Literature and the Culture and Theory Ph.D. Program. Her research examines the international dimensions of racialization, racial identities, and the racialization of poverty with a focus on the influence that scholars from South Africa and the U.S. have had on each other in the framing of their distinctive national debates about race and post-raciality. As a comparative political theorist, she is concerned about the function of race and enslavement in national identity, which has important implications for theories of citizenship, immigration, democracy and gendering justice. A poet concerned with the historiography of the post-apartheid transition, the material conditions of knowledge production, and political theory and publishing, her scholarship demonstrates a commitment to “deep” interdisciplinarity. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from UC Santa Barbara. She is the widely published author of Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (University of California Press, 2015), and has been the editor and/or editorial advisory board member of many scholarly academic journals. Her distinguished leadership includes being the vice president for the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and co-PI with historian professor Jessica Millward of the prestigious three-year UC-Historically Black Colleges and Universities pathways grant. A former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, her dozen years of diversity, equity, and inclusion research and leadership at UC Irvine have included collaborations and multi-year research including: the Scandal in Real Time National Conference on Black Women, Politics, and Oral History Conference and Oral History Training, the Words of Wild Survival: Wombs, Wounds, Water Two Week Seminar and Conference, the launch of the Courageous and Transformative Action for Environmental Justice Writing Award, an African American Studies and Medical Humanities partnership with the UCI Medical school’s LEAD-ABC program, The Truly Diverse Faculty: New Dialogues in American Higher Education book launch, numerous talks and presentations with the DECADE program and the Office of Inclusive Excellence, and mentoring over three dozen undergraduate students through the undergraduate research programs on this campus. Recognized nationally and internationally for her mentoring work in African politics and LGBTQ+ politics, the committee to bring the Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond to campus and her work with the X: Black Womxn Daily affinity group are key places where she measures her accountability to this community.

Portillo

Penny Portillo is responsible for planning, operations, and resource management for the School of Humanities, involving all of its instructional, research and administrative functions. She came to the dean’s office after leading the school’s Office of Undergraduate Study for seven years. Prior to joining UCI, Penny held management positions in the software industry and, subsequently, in international education at UC Santa Cruz. An undergraduate alumna of UCI, she holds two advanced degrees from Stanford University--a MA in Education and a MBA.