CLAS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Assistant Dean
- Distinguished Educator and Researcher
Adrienne Provost is a distinguished educator and researcher with a Ph.D. in Social Foundations of Education from the University of Florida. She currently serves as Assistant Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. Nationally recognized for her innovative programming, Dr. Provost has received numerous awards, including the 2024 Terry O'Banion Legacy Award and the 2022 Santa Fe College Advocacy Leadership Award. Her passion for expanding higher education access and equity has significantly increased educational opportunities for low-income, first-generation students. Dr. Provost's academic interests include the history of higher education, community colleges, humanistic education, general education, and higher education policy and legislation. Her current research focuses on the ideological influences behind the founding mission of community colleges in the U.S. and the resulting political, social, and economic tensions during the shift toward neoliberalism.
Job Titles:
- Senior Director of Development, Corporate and Foundation Relations
Sean Adams (Ph.D., Wisconsin) is the Hyatt and Cici Brown Professor of History and interim associate dean. He teaches classes on the global history of energy, American capitalism, and 19th century U.S. History. Adams is the founder and director of Inquire Capitalism program (https://inquire-capitalism.clas.ufl.edu/ (opens in new tab)), which supports research on global capitalism and has several public-facing digital research projects on business history.
A specialist in the Industrial Revolution, Adams is the author of Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America (Johns Hopkins, 2004), Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins, 2014), and a three-volume anthology entitled The American Coal Industry, 1789-1902 (Routledge, 2013). He is the editor of The Early American Republic: A Documentary Reader (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) and The Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), as well as numerous articles, reviews, and book chapters. He is currently writing two books, one on the economic and historical value of land in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, as well as a survey of America's Industrial Revolution.
Job Titles:
- Associate Director of Communications
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director of Donor Relations
Job Titles:
- Associate Dean
- Associate Dean / Director, Academic Advising Center
Gillian Lord (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University) is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics. She joined the University of Florida faculty in 2001, where she worked for many years as Spanish Language Program Director, coordinating and overseeing the Beginning and Intermediate Spanish courses. She later chaired the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies from 2010 through 2021. Her research focuses on the teaching and learning of Spanish as a second/foreign language, with an emphasis on the sound system (e.g., pronunciation) of second language speakers of Spanish, and the use of technology in language education. Dr. Lord has held leadership roles in a number of professional organizations, such as the American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators, the Modern Language Association's Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL), and as President of the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO).
Job Titles:
- Administrative Support Assistant
Job Titles:
- Director of the UF Honors Program
- Interim Associate Dean
Kevin Knudson joined UF as Director of the UF Honors Program and Professor of Mathematics in 2009. He then served as chair of the Department of Mathematics from 2018 to 2024. During that time the department hired nearly 20 new faculty, grew the research enterprise, significantly expanded its outreach activities, and moved its lower-division courses to open-source materials, which have saved UF students more than $4M to date.
Knudson was an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, where he graduated from the Honors Program, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and was a member of the Corps of Cadets. He earned his PhD in mathematics at Duke University in 1996 under the direction of Richard Hain and received a National Science Foundation Mathematical Sciences Research Postdoctoral Fellowship which he used at Northwestern University. He subsequently held tenure-track positions at Wayne State University in Detroit and Mississippi State University before coming to UF. Knudson was named a CLAS Teacher of the Year in 2016 and was inducted into the UF Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars the same year. He has written more than 30 research articles and published three books in algebraic topology and related areas.
When he is not working on administrative or math problems, Knudson enjoys cooking, kayaking, hiking, playing the guitar, and spending time with his family. He is married to book artist Ellen Knudson and they have one son, Gustav, a composer living in Vancouver, BC.
Job Titles:
- Senior Director of Development
Job Titles:
- Associate Director of External Engagement
Job Titles:
- Executive Director of Advancement
Margaret Fields joined the CLAS dean's office in 2004. She earned her specialist in education degree in 2000 and a PhD in higher education administration in 2002 from College of Education. (opens in new tab)
Previously, Fields served as the coordinator of administrative services for UF's zoology department (opens in new tab) and served as vice president of operations for a research institute after her stint with AT&T Information Systems Headquarters in New Jersey.
She is a former chair of the Board of Directors for the Leadership Gainesville Alumni Association, (opens in new tab) North Central Florida American Red Cross and the chair-elect of the Board of Directors for Association of Psychological Type International, (opens in new tab) which is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. The group is an international professional membership organization which promotes the practical application and ethical use of psychological type through continuous learning and research.
Fields' research has focused on academic integrity and influencing factors such as gender, self-esteem and psychological type. Her most recent research concerns the relationship of standardized test scores and young students' preferences for taking in information. She has recently published several articles and has authored a chapter in a book "Leadership & Type" (opens in new tab) and co-authored a book "Shape Up Your Program." (opens in new tab)
Job Titles:
- Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts
Mary Watt is interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of Italian in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. She began the appointment as interim dean on July 1, 2024. Previously in the Dean's Office, she was associate dean with responsibility for faculty affairs, undergraduate concerns, the African American Studies Program, the Center for African Studies, the Center for European Studies, and the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies.
Watt holds a Ph.D. in Italian studies and a J.D., both from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses on medieval and early modern Italian literature and culture, with a particular focus on Dante's Divine Comedy. Her work has been supported by the Rothman Endowment for the Humanities, the Municipality of Ravenna, Italy, and the University of Oslo's Norwegian Institute in Rome. She is the author of more than 50 journal articles, book chapters, and translations. She has served as a review editor of Speculum, the journal of the American Medieval Academy. Watt has been a Goggio Chair Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto and has given talks at multiple universities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She is the author of The Cross that Dante Bears: Pilgrimage, Crusade, and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy (University Press of Florida, 2005); Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition: Spiritual Imperialism in the Italian Imaginatio n (Routledge, 2017); and Dante's Golden Legend: Auto-hagiography in the Divine Comedy (Mercer University Press, 2021).
Job Titles:
- Senior Director of Strategic Engagement
Job Titles:
- Assistant and Associate Deans
- Interim Associate Dean
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director of Strategic Engagement
Job Titles:
- Associate Director of Development
Job Titles:
- Creative Production Manager