Project Summary
This project encompasses two essential activities, both of which seek to develop practices that will better align assessment of faculty achievements with the core institutional values of the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and its College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS). The first activity is identifying and effectively communicating peer review mechanisms in public-facing, community-engaged, collaborative work with partners outside academia. The second is developing strategies that more effectively identify, assess, and recognize faculty work that contributes to UCR’s core values of promoting a diverse, equitable, inclusive academic community and the upward mobility of historically underrepresented groups without artificially disentangling that work from the research, teaching, and service activities of which it is a constitutive part. The project entails triangulating how faculty explain their work, how departments outline their fields’ modes of scholarship and general standards of assessment, and UCR's declared core values in these key areas. We hope developing clearer, more efficient metrics and language for relating faculty accomplishments to core values will bring our assessment practices into better alignment with our declared intents as a College and university.
Biography
Kiril Tomoff joined the History Department faculty at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) in 2001 after completing with distinction his Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet History at the University of Chicago. He completed his undergraduate work summa cum laude at the University of Arizona in 1992. His research interests include the intersection of musical life and Russian history, as well as 20th-century world history, transnational cultural exchange, and the Cold War. He is the author of numerous articles, a co-edited volume, and two books: Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945-1958 (Cornell, 2015), and Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939-1953 (Cornell, 2006). He is a past Director of the University of California's Moscow Study Center (2004-05), a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Fellow (1998-99), and a Senior Fellow at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (2012-13). At UCR, he has served as the Vice Chair (2015-16) and Chair (2016-18) of the History Department, and, since 2018, in his current role as Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.