Alyson Gill, PhD
Dr. Alyson Gill has served in higher education leadership since 2015, first as Associate Provost for Instructional Innovation at a large public land-grant institution, then as Provost at two private Colleges. Prior to moving into an administrative role, she was a tenured faculty member in Art History and the founding director for the Center for Digital Initiatives at Arkansas State University. From 2015-18 she served as Associate Provost for Instructional Innovation and Associate Professor, Art History at University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she served as a catalyst for instructional innovation and technology initiatives by building and sustaining relationships with faculty, Chairs, and Deans around strategies and programming. While at UMass she also played an advocacy role on behalf of faculty and students in campus matters related to instructional innovations, pedagogical advancements, and teaching and learning with technology, working closely with academic units to ensure that their needs were incorporated into undergraduate and graduate seated and online course delivery and instructional technology plans.
As Provost she has focused on building more inclusive academic communities and worked closely with HR to shape policies for search committees to ensure inclusivity with respect to hiring practices, mindful of the need to not only recruit, but also retain and “re-recruit” faculty, and build strong peer mentor resources along with robust faculty engagement initiatives. She deepened active learning by building resources and offering workshops in backwards course design and experiential learning while linking this work to assessment practices, working closely with the faculty to re-envision a curriculum that is more student-centered and embraces the liberal arts but also focuses on pre-professional career prep with embedded certifications along the way. Throughout her academic and later administrative career, Gill has prioritized student-centered active learning, and has a strong record of program building and innovation that meets the changing needs of students. She has worked with faculty to build accessible and strong online courses, and has launched new online graduate programs designed to meet regional needs for nontraditional learners while also adding additional pathways for undergraduates after graduation. In doing this, she has considered programmatic options, course times and modalities, access to course materials, and community-building for a diverse population of online students.
Gill earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Memphis, and an M.A. in Art History specializing in Greek architecture from University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation topic focused on Greek baths and the gendered use of space in Classical antiquity, and this work brought her to Greece where she worked at the Ohio State University excavations at Isthmia and later returned on a Fulbright grant to live in Athens. She has been awarded several grants through the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) including two Digital Humanities Start-Up grants: Ashes2Art (2007) and Dangerous Embodiments (2014-17), and co-directed two NEH Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Summer Institutes, “Humanities Heritage 3D Visualizations” (2012) and “Advanced Challenges in Theory and Practice in 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites” (2015-16).
Gill and her husband have 4 daughters, and their most recent addition to the family is a Goldendoodle puppy (Lucy) who joins their 6-year-old Goldendoodle Katie.