Don Pope-Davis
Dean of the College of Education and Human Ecology
Don Pope-Davis (PhD, Stanford University) is Dean of the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University. He is passionate about using higher education to address issues of equity, economic growth and the psychological well-being of educators and students. An educator for more than 25 years, he previously was dean of the College of Education at New Mexico State University, a Hispanic-serving institution. He also served in senior-level positions at the University of Notre Dame. Pope-Davis’ work on religious attitudes, multicultural competence and unintentional racism in counseling is widely published in peer-reviewed journals. He is an elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association's Society for Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues and a Fellow of the Society of Counseling Psychology. He recently co-authored a book, published by Cambridge University Press, examines the attitudes of Black Catholics in America. He is president of the Council of Academic Deans from Research Education Institutions (CADREI), a member of Deans for Social Justice and Equity in Education and past chair of the American Psychological Association’s Committee of Ethnic Minority Affairs. He has been recognized as an influential educator. He received his doctorate from Stanford University.
Lisa Florman
Vice Provost for the Arts
Lisa Florman (PhD, Columbia University) is Vice Provost for the Arts at The Ohio State University. Specializing in Art History, her primary interests are in modernism, the history of art history and, above all, the intersection of the two. Her publications have addressed, for example, Clement Greenberg’s 1959 essay, “Collage,” and “The Philosophical Brothel,” Leo Steinberg’s seminal work on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Florman’s first book, Myth and Metamorphosis (MIT Press, 2000), examined Picasso’s classicizing prints of the 1930s in the context of both surrealism and contemporaneous understandings of classical antiquity, especially as those had been handed down from Lessing and Hegel. Her second book, Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete—in Kandinsky’s Art (Stanford University Press, 2014), argues that Kandinsky’s understanding of Spirit [Geist] is fundamentally the same as Hegel’s, and that the artist’s famous essay, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” is above all a response to Hegel’s Aesthetics. Drawing on an important but little known text about Kandinsky by his nephew, Alexandre Kojève, as well as on detailed analyses of individual paintings by Kandinsky, the book attempts to provide a rigorously philosophical account of why painting turned to abstraction in the early years of the twentieth century.