Sarah Cole, a professor of English and former department chair and divisional dean, has been appointed to lead the School of the Arts.
A member of the Columbia faculty since 1999, Cole chaired the Department of English and Comparative Literature for two years before becoming dean of humanities in 2018. She served in that position, which gave her responsibility for thirteen academic departments and sixteen interdisciplinary centers and institutes, until being chosen to serve as interim arts dean in 2023, when Carol Becker stepped down after sixteen years in the job.
The School of the Arts is composed of the departments of film, theater, visual and sound arts, and writing; its dean also oversees the Lenfest Center for the Arts and Miller Theatre.
Cole, a graduate of Williams College and the University of California, Berkeley, is an expert in nineteenthand twentieth-century literature. She is the author of books on H. G. Wells, literary depictions of male friendship in World War I and its aftermath, and the influence of political violence on British and Irish modernism.
