Summer 2012
Around the Quads
Coatsworth Appointed University Provost
By Karen Iorio
Photo: Eileen BarrosoAfter seven months serving in an interim capacity, John H. Coatsworth was named provost in February.
Coatsworth, a professor of history and of international and public affairs, had been dean of SIPA since 2008. He was interim dean of SIPA from 2007–08 and a visiting professor at Columbia from 2006–07.
“John has demonstrated consummate skill in leading Columbia forward on a host of complex matters critical to our future,” President Lee C. Bollinger said in a letter to the University community announcing the appointment. “I am, personally, very pleased that John will serve in this vital University role and as my colleague.”
As provost, Coatsworth is the University’s chief academic officer, overseeing faculty and programs. He plans to expand the University’s capacity for research and interdisciplinary work among the sciences. As interim provost, he established a standing tenure committee, continued to make progress on the initiative to enhance faculty and pipeline diversity, and coordinated Columbia’s proposal to the city for a new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering, among other accomplishments.
“This is an opportunity to help make Columbia greater than the sum of its parts and an even better place to work, think and study,” Coatsworth said of his position.
A leading scholar on Latin-American economics and history, Coatsworth was the Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs at Harvard from 1992–2007 and was founding director of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. He taught at Chicago from 1969–92 and has held visiting professorships in Mexico, Argentina and Spain.
Coatsworth is the former president of the American Historical Association and the Latin American Studies Association and has served on the editorial boards of American Historical Review, the Journal of Economic History and the Hispanic American Historical Review. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Coatsworth earned a B.A. in history from Wesleyan and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economic history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1986 and has been appointed a senior Fulbright lecturer three times.