New Horizons for Dean Scott Casper

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 10:24:41 -0400

Dear Faculty and Staff,

It is with mixed emotions we share that our colleague Scott Casper, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, will step down from his position at UMBC late this summer to become president of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). We will miss him, and yet we are also very proud and know he will do a superb job as president of the AAS.

Dean Casper is one of UMBC’s most admired leaders — as a scholar, academic administrator, and human being. He has done a masterful job as dean of our College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Most important, he lives the values we consider most significant in the humanities, including intellectual curiosity, compassion for others, and an abiding commitment to social justice.

Under Dean Casper’s leadership, the campus received the distinguished Community Engagement Classification from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2020. This achievement required a rigorous campus-wide self-study of UMBC’s work with communities in Greater Baltimore and beyond, a process that involved more than 120 members of the UMBC community as well as dozens of community partners.

The College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences scaled up research in various ways during Dean Casper’s tenure, including the creation of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. The college's commitment to community engagement and civic agency has been notable, reflected in the most recent Mellon Foundation grant (one of two Mellon grants), in hosting the Imagining America conference in 2015, in the establishment of the Lion Brothers space in downtown Baltimore, and in the new Community Leadership MPS and Public Humanities minor. And, in the time since Dean Casper’s arrival, CAHSS has hired one third of its current faculty, enriching the campus with the addition of an extraordinary, diverse cohort of brilliant scholars and artists, and outstanding teachers.

He has also worked to develop robust relationships with external organizations. Under his guidance, UMBC signed an MOU with The Walters Art Museum, and he served on the advisory committee for the reinstallation of The Walters’ 1 West Mount Vernon Place. He serves on the boards of Maryland Humanities and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.

The American Antiquarian Society, of which Dean Casper will become president this fall, was founded in 1812 by Revolutionary War patriot and printer Isaiah Thomas, and is both a learned society and a major independent research library. The AAS library today houses the largest and most accessible collection of books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, music, and graphic arts material printed through 1876 in what is now the United States, as well as manuscripts and a substantial collection of secondary texts, bibliographies, and digital resources and reference works related to all aspects of American history and culture before the twentieth century. AAS was presented with the 2013 National Humanities Medal by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House.

Dean Casper joined UMBC in 2013 after many years on the faculty of the University of Nevada, Reno. A historian of the nineteenth-century United States who received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University, he is the author of Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine (Hill & Wang, 2008) and Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and the co-author, editor, or co-editor of seven other books, most recently The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2013). He edited the annual “Textbooks and Teaching” section of the Journal of American History from 2008 to 2018, and was acting editor of The William and Mary Quarterly in 2008–09. He has worked extensively with K-12 history and social studies educators through the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the Center for Civic Education, and the Northern Nevada Teaching American History Project.

The Provost will be working with the CAHSS community as plans for this transition are being developed.

Please join us in congratulating Dean Casper as he moves forward to lead the American Antiquarian Society, where we expect nothing less than greatness from him. He will always be part of the UMBC community.

President Freeman Hrabowski and Provost Philip Rous