Provost Linda Petrosino has announced that Michael Richardson will serve as interim dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences for the 2018–19 academic year, while a search for the successor to Vincent Wang is conducted. The appointment is effective July 1, 2018. Wang had announced that he is stepping down as dean and—following a sabbatical in 2018–19—returning to the faculty as a tenured professor in the Department of Politics.
Richardson, who also served as interim dean of the school from June 2015 to June 2016, is currently a professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and serves as a faculty member in the Honors Program. He has deep expertise in 20th- and 21st-century German literature and cinema and Holocaust studies.
He has also served as an associate dean of the school, where he was responsible for providing overall direction in support of faculty within the school, particularly in the areas of professional development, research, and external grants.
Richardson joined the college in 1998, and has taught a variety of German courses in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. He served as department chair from 2008 to 2012, and was promoted to full professor in 2014.
“The School of Humanities and Sciences is in good hands with Mike during this transitional period,” said Petrosino. “His service as a faculty member, department chair, associate dean and interim dean within H&S provides us with the experience and knowledge that’s necessary to lead the school until a new dean is appointed.”
Richardson’s scholarly research interests encompass 20th- and 21st-century literature, theater, and film, from the Weimar Republic to contemporary Germany. His current research focuses on three areas: constructions of history in recent German cinema, Holocaust cinema, and the Holocaust and World War II in American and German popular culture. He is the author of Revolutionary Theater and the Classical Heritage: Inheritance and Appropriation from Weimar to the GDR (2007); is a co-editor with David Bathrick and Brad Prager of Visualizing the Holocaust: Aesthetics, Documents, History (2008); and is co-editor with Jennifer Kapczynski of A New History of German Cinema (2012), which was named film book of the year for 2012 by the respected German film scholar Hans-Helmut Prinzler. He is currently working on two projects: a book-length study of representations of Hitler in German and American film and literature and an edited collection of essays that re-evaluate Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film Downfall from a contemporary perspective. He is also an editor of New German Critique.
He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from Cornell University, and an A.B. from Stanford University.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20180703111030687