New Dean of College of Arts & Sciences to Join Stony Brook
June 10, 2024
Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to announce that David Wrobel will serve as the next dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University, following an extensive national search led by an exemplary search committee. Dr. Wrobel joins Stony Brook from the University of Oklahoma, where he currently serves as dean of the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Wrobel is an experienced administrator and renowned scholar who is exceptionally well-suited to lead CAS at Stony Brook. He and I have had many conversations already about the incredible strengths and potential in CAS among the faculty, staff, and students, and its many outstanding departments, centers, and programs. His appointment at Stony Brook begins August 1.
Dr. Wrobel has served as dean at Oklahoma since 2017, serving as interim for a year before being permanently appointed to the role in 2018. Under his leadership, he has worked with his team on a variety of significant achievements, including navigating from inherited financial debt to a positive fiscal position; securing the largest gift in OU history to name the college, as well as a $16 million gift to found a new quantum research center and two major department naming gifts; implementing a strategic plan; establishing a School of Biological Sciences and a School of Population Health and Human Performance (pending regents’ approval); and creating scholarships and programs to enhance support for underserved undergraduates, attract top graduate students, and support faculty research and creative activity.
Dr. Wrobel shared the following in regard to joining CAS at Stony Brook.
“I am thrilled and honored to begin my work in support of the exceptional faculty, staff, and students of CAS at Stony Brook. The college and SBU exemplify the ideal and the purpose of a student-centered, public research university to ensure high levels of access and opportunity to advance social mobility, and to integrate students at all levels into the mission of creating and applying new knowledge and understanding of the physical world and the human condition to make our communities stronger. I look forward to joining the Stony Brook community and continuing my work of advocacy for and integration of the Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at one of the nation’s leading public institutions of higher learning.”
At Oklahoma since 2011, Dr. Wrobel is the David L. Boren Professor and Merrick Chair of Western American History. He is a historian of the American West and American thought and culture, and has been recognized for excellence in teaching, research, and service. He was the inaugural recipient of the David L. Boren Professorship, one of the most prestigious honors at Oklahoma. Other honors include the Western Heritage Award for his nonfiction book, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression; the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences Holden Award for Teaching Excellence; and research fellowships from Yale University’s Beinecke Library, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, and the American Philosophical Society.
His most recent book is America’s West: A History, 1890-1950 (2017). He is also the author of Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory and the Creation of the American West and The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal. His current book project is John Steinbeck’s Country: A Writer's Defense of Democracy. Dr. Wrobel also serves on the editorial board for the Steinbeck Review, and for Montana: The Magazine of Western History.
He is also known for his work with teachers around the country, participating in and directing many teacher institutes sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, U.S. Department of Education, National Council for History Education and other organizations.
He is past president of the Western History Association, the American Historical Association’s Pacific Coast Branch, and of Phi Alpha Theta, the National History Honor Society.
He holds master’s and doctoral degrees in American Intellectual History from The Ohio University and earned a bachelor of arts degree in history/philosophy from the University of Kent, Canterbury, England. Dr. Wrobel was also department chair and professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Joining Dr. Wrobel in the move are his wife, Janet Ward, and their three children. Dr. Ward will join the Provost’s Office in an associate provost role focused on support for the arts, humanities, and social sciences. At Oklahoma, she is Brammer Presidential Professor of History and Faculty Fellow for Strategic Initiatives in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences. She also served at Oklahoma as the inaugural faculty director of the Arts and Humanities Forum, as senior associate vice president for research and partnerships, and, most recently, as American Council on Education fellow at Yale University.
I would like to thank the search committee for their exceptional leadership of the search process. They were incredibly thoughtful throughout their deliberations as they reviewed candidates and their alignment with our needs at Stony Brook. I would especially like to thank the search co-chairs, Alfredo Fontanini, professor and chair, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, and Celia Marshik, dean of the Graduate School, and professor, Department of English.
I also want to thank Axel Drees for serving as interim dean of CAS for the past year. He has brought strategic leadership paired with a strong commitment to shared governance and transparency that has kept morale high and the College moving forward in this time of transition. I know he will be an essential colleague for Dr. Wrobel as he joins Stony Brook and CAS.
I am excited to have Dr. Wrobel and Dr. Ward join us at Stony Brook. Please join me in welcoming them to our community.
Sincerely,
Carl Lejuez
Provost and Executive Vice President