College Dean Rosario Ceballo on “healing, rebuilding, and reimagining”

Title:College of Arts and Sciences Dean Rosario Ceballo on “healing, rebuilding, and reimagining”

Author: Camille Scarborough
Date Published: September 27, 2022

Earlier this year, Rosario Ceballo joined the Georgetown community as dean of Georgetown College of Arts and Sciences. She previously worked at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor as associate dean for social sciences and professor of psychology and women’s and gender studies.

Ceballo’s interdisciplinary academic research has given her ample opportunities to think about how we approach challenges from a resilience mindset. She has studied infertility and reproductive difficulties among women of color, as well as how adolescents cope with community violence in low-income and underserved neighborhoods. Both areas of study consider the strengths that enable people to endure through difficult life circumstances.

Recently, she outlined four goals for her deanship as she looks forward to the fall semester.

“My first goal is to be a fierce advocate for a liberal arts education, because I believe it teaches students to dialogue across our differences respectfully, to remain open to new perspectives, to embrace intellectual exploration, to tolerate uncertainty, and to foster concern for the greater good, for service to others, and for social justice,” she explains. “People who can embrace these skills and insights are desperately needed in our world today.”

To that end, she’s excited to work on the creation of the university’s new Humanities Center.

She identifies a second, longer-term priority to integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion into every aspect of the College. “Diversity—in terms of race and ethnicity as well as gender, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, nationality, physical ability, and political ideology—is essential to our continued excellence as a liberal arts college and to our ability to maintain the highest standards in research and teaching.”

A third ongoing goal will be “to foster bridges across scholarly disciplines to address pressing world problems,” she explains. “Some of the most exciting, cutting-edge scholarship is being done by young scholars working in new, emerging fields at the crossroads of several traditional disciplines.” As an example of this interdisciplinary work, she cites the upcoming B.S. degree in International Business, Language, and Culture (IBLC) to be offered jointly by Georgetown College of Arts and Sciences and the McDonough School of Business.

Finally, Ceballo is looking forward to “inspiring and building a culture of purpose and well-being for all members of our intellectual community. The people in the College are our most valuable resource, and as we learn to live with the experience of a pandemic, we will need to heal, rebuild, and reimagine ways of being together. For many young people, the pandemic has taken a large toll on their sense of stability and security.”

She believes that “the pandemic has also exacerbated many existing inequalities in our society and that we must search for ways to prioritize greater balance and well-being for all members of our community—students, faculty, and staff—as we move forward.”

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