Deans
John W. Boyer
Dean, The College
1116 E. 59th Street, W606
Chicago, IL 60637
Phone: 773.702.8576
fax: 773.702.5846
jwboyer@uchicago.edu
John W. Boyer, the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in History, was appointed to a fourth term as Dean of the College in 2007. He became Dean of the College in 1992.
During his tenure as Dean of the College, Boyer has strengthened the College curriculum and the College's admissions program, as well as creating the new Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Boyer was also deeply involved in the establishment of the University of Chicago Center in Paris. He has worked to create many new programs for College students involving foreign study, internships, and foreign language instruction; to expand student research opportunities; and to strengthen resources for student life.
Boyer has served as Chairman of the Council on Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences since 1986 and as Co-Editor of the Journal of Modern History since 1980. In 1992 and 1993 he was Acting Dean of the Division of Social Sciences.
A specialist in the history of the Habsburg Empire and of Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Boyer received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1975 and joined the faculty in the same year. Boyer has written two books, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897 (for which he was awarded the John Gilmary Shea Prize) and Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897-1918 (for which he was awarded the Ludwig Jedlicka Prize), both published by the University of Chicago Press. Boyer was also co-general editor of the nine-volume University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization. In 2004 Boyer was awarded the Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class, by the Republic of Austria, in recognition of his scholarly work on the history of the Habsburg Empire. He received the 2006 Austrian State Prize for Modern History. He is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Boyer regularly teaches European Civilization in the College, and courses on religion and politics in modern European history and on the history of the Habsburg Empire and modern Germany.
Boyer's works in progress include the Austria, 1867-1985 volume for the Oxford History of Modern Europe Series, and a history of the University of Chicago. As part of the second project, he has written a series of eleven monographs on various aspects of the history of the College and the University, most recently extended essays on William Rainey Harper and the founding of the University and on the origins of the Core curriculum in the College in the 1930s.
Related site: http://www.college.uchicago.edu