Sophia Acord & Trysh Travis

Sophia Acord and Trysh Travis
Sophia Acord and Trysh Travis, University of Florida

Project Summary

The University of Florida is fielding a HuMetricsHSS team that spans the humanities and humanities-allied arts and social sciences across the College of the Arts, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and College of Design, Construction and Planning. This team is working in the context of a move towards Academics Analytics to articulate values-based metrics for faculty excellence that recognize disciplinary accreditation, innovation and creativity, and genre plurality in these fields. Through establishment of a project task force, virtual panels, peer information-seeking, and facilitated workshops with university faculty, the team will document strategies for articulating scholarly and creative impacts to diverse university stakeholders. This work feeds into a variety of university-wide initiatives including awards nominations, antiracism, and faculty mentoring structures.

Biography

Sophia Krzys Acord

Sophia Krzys Acord is Associate Dean for Research and Strategic Initiatives in the University of Florida (UF) College of the Arts. She is responsible for overseeing research support, facilities, assessment and reporting, and strategic planning for the college, and invites collaborative initiatives from across campus, regionally, and internationally. Acord’s prior appointments include Associate Director of the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California-Berkeley where she managed the Future of Scholarly Communication Project. As a cultural sociologist, Dr. Acord studies the production of knowledge in the arts and humanities. Her work and collaborative partnerships have received support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Florida Humanities Council, and Southeastern Consortium. She has published work in the sociology of the arts, museum studies, higher education, mobile technologies, and qualitative research methods, and was a founding editor of the peer-reviewed open-access journal Music and Arts in Action. She holds a Ph.D. and M.Res in Sociology from the University of Exeter and a Bachelor of Arts from Swarthmore College.

Trysh Travis 

Trysh Travis is Associate Dean in the UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies, and a cultural and literary historian whose work looks at the gendered history of medicine and popular therapeutic cultures. While working as a high school teacher, she earned an MA from the Bread Loaf School of English, followed by a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. She is the author of The Language of the Heart: Twelve-Step Recovery from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey (UNC Press, 2009) and co-editor (with Timothy Aubry) of Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (Chicago, 2016). Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and appeared in venues such as PMLA, American Quarterly, Contemporary Drug Problems, and Raritan: A Quarterly Review. With UF colleague Joseph Spillane, she is the co-founder of the translational humanities project Points: The Joint Blog of the Alcohol & Drugs History Society and the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, where she currently serves as Managing Editor Emerita.