Current Dean of the College of Arts & Letters

Christopher P. Long, 2015–Present

Christopher P. Long, Professor of Philosophy and MSU Research Foundation Professor, is Dean of the College of Arts & Letters with additional leadership responsibilities as the Dean of the Honors College at Michigan State University. Dean Long is committed to expanding the transformative power of liberal arts research and teaching by enriching graduate and undergraduate education, deepening our commitment to equity, recruiting and retaining world-class faculty, and creating new opportunities for collaboration among community partners.

He began his tenure as Dean on July 1, 2015. Under his leadership, several advances have been made to help raise the College’s international reputation including the creation of the Center for Interdisciplinarity, the Citizen Scholars program, the Critical Diversity in a Digital Age initiative, and the Excel Network. He has successfully established the College of Arts & Letters as a catalyst of innovation and collaboration at MSU through signature partnerships with the MSU Libraries to create the Digital Scholarship Lab.

An advocate of public scholarship, open access, and digital approaches to scholarship and pedagogy, Dean Long has frequently written about the benefits of using digital modes of communication to enable public education, scholarship, and collaboration. He also discusses these issues in his Digital Dialogue podcast and the Long View blog.

He is co-founder of the Public Philosophy Journal, an open forum for the curation and creation of accessible scholarship that deepens our understanding of issues related to public relevance, and editor of The Journal for General Education, a journal focused on general education as a cornerstone of the arts of liberty that prepare citizens to live engaged, responsible, and meaningful lives.

Dean Long is PI for a $1.2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to lead a multi-university research project to improve the teaching of less commonly taught languages (or LCTLs) with the Big Ten Academic Alliance. He is also co-PI for the Mellon-funded HuMetricsHSS, an initiative for rethinking humane indicators of excellence in academia, focused particularly on the humanities and social sciences (HSS).

An expert on both ancient Greek and contemporary continental philosophy, Dean Long has extensive publications in Ancient Greek and Contemporary Continental Philosophy, including four books: The Ethics of Ontology (SUNY 2004), Aristotle On the Nature of Truth (Cambridge 2010), Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading (Cambridge 2014), and Reiner Schürmann and the Poetics of Politics (Punctum 2018).

Dean Long received his MA and PhD from the New School for Social Research in New York and BA from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Prior to coming to MSU, he was Associate Dean for Graduate and Undergraduate Education and Professor of Philosophy and Classics in the College of the Liberal Arts at Pennsylvania State University.

To learn more about Dean Long’s administrative approach and his research in philosophy, digital scholarly communication, and higher education, visit his blog: www.cplong.org or reach him on Twitter @cplong.