Douglas Dempster named fine Arts dean

Douglas Dempster, acting interim dean of the College of Fine Arts since fall 2006 and senior associate dean of the college since 2001, has been appointed dean of the college. Dempster, who holds the Marie and Joseph D. Jamail Senior Regents Professorship and the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Fine Arts as a professor in the college’s Department of Theatre and Dance, was named after a national search. With research specialties in aesthetics, the philosophy of music theory, cultural policy studies and the philosophy of language, Dempster teaches and is widely published in a diverse range of fields. He earned his doctor’s and master’s degree in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and wrote his dissertation on the semantics of representation and realism in the visual arts. As an undergraduate, he studied philosophical aesthetics and political science at St. Lawrence (N.Y.) University.