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Walk through the University of Washington campus with Antoinette Wills (PhD, History, 1975), and you may see familiar sights with new eyes…

 

Maya Smith, the College's inaugural associate dean for equity, justice and inclusion (EJI), supports programs, policies, and practices that promote EJI across the departments and centers in the College’s four divisions. She articulates the College’s EJI vision and action plan, fosters communication among various Arts & Sciences units, and provides guidance on how to adapt University EJI goals to best serve each unit. Smith connects people engaging in creative approaches to equity work with others across campus to break down silos and help build a community of practice around EJI.

Activities related to this work include updating and maintaining the College’s EJI website, constructing a repository of EJI materials, administering co-sponsorship funds for EJI-related programming, analyzing departmental EJI work, publishing a quarterly EJI newsletter, conducting annual EJI climate surveys, spearheading college-level EJI programming, convening with other EJI leads on campus, attending local and national conferences that focus on EJI, and brainstorming with individuals and departments about how to best do EJI work in specific contexts.

An associate professor of French, Smith comes to her EJI role as a sociolinguist whose scholarship broadly focuses on the intersection of racial and linguistic identity formations among marginalized groups in the Francophone African diaspora. Through a critical examination of language and multilingual practices in qualitative, ethnographic data, her book, “Senegal Abroad: Linguistic Borders, Racial Formations and Diasporic Imaginaries” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), shows how language is key in understanding the formation of national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities among Senegalese in Paris, Rome, and New York. Dr. Smith's book won the Modern Language Association's 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione French and Francophone Studies Prize.

Smith is the recipient of several grants, including the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty, the UW Research Royalty Fund Fellowship, the Simpson Center Society of Scholars, and the Camargo Foundation Fellowship. She completed the MA/BA program at New York University and the Institute of French Studies and received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in Romance Languages and Linguistics.

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Maya Smith, the College's inaugural associate dean for equity, justice and inclusion (EJI), supports programs, policies, and practices that promote EJI across the departments and centers in the College’s four divisions. She articulates the College’s EJI vision and action plan, fosters communication among various Arts & Sciences units, and provides guidance on how to adapt University EJI goals to best serve each unit. Smith connects people engaging in creative approaches to equity work with others across campus to break down silos and help build a community of practice around EJI.

Activities related to this work include updating and maintaining the College’s EJI website, constructing a repository of EJI materials, administering co-sponsorship funds for EJI-related programming, analyzing departmental EJI work, publishing a quarterly EJI newsletter, conducting annual EJI climate surveys, spearheading college-level EJI programming, convening with other EJI leads on campus, attending local and national conferences that focus on EJI, and brainstorming with individuals and departments about how to best do EJI work in specific contexts.

An associate professor of French, Smith comes to her EJI role as a sociolinguist whose scholarship broadly focuses on the intersection of racial and linguistic identity formations among marginalized groups in the Francophone African diaspora. Through a critical examination of language and multilingual practices in qualitative, ethnographic data, her book, “Senegal Abroad: Linguistic Borders, Racial Formations and Diasporic Imaginaries” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), shows how language is key in understanding the formation of national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities among Senegalese in Paris, Rome, and New York. Dr. Smith's book won the Modern Language Association's 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione French and Francophone Studies Prize.

Smith is the recipient of several grants, including the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty, the UW Research Royalty Fund Fellowship, the Simpson Center Society of Scholars, and the Camargo Foundation Fellowship. She completed the MA/BA program at New York University and the Institute of French Studies and received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in Romance Languages and Linguistics.

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1,062 Undergraduate majors EDUCATION …

As associate dean for personnel for the College of Arts and Sciences, Peter Denis is a key problem solver in all manner of personnel, faculty, contractual, and policy issues that are part of the life of the College. His substantial legal training and long experience as a lawyer informs his work. He sits on all of the collective bargaining committees as the primary College liaison with Labor Relations and is engaged in all grievance issues regarding staff and faculty.

Prior to his current  role, Denis was the UW’s assistant vice president for labor relations, a position he held for almost ten years. In both of these roles, Denis has been tasked with representing the interests of the institution and ensuring that best human resource management practices and unstinting integrity be applied to the dealings with the people who work for or who are associated with the University of Washington.

Denis has acted as the chief spokesperson for the UW and the College in matters relating to collective bargaining, dispute resolution, and contract interpretation. He values the mission of the UW and the College and seeks to ensure that the actions undertaken in the day-to-day management of our people reflect and further those missions.

Prior to joining the UW in 2008, Denis was vice president of human resources for Harrison Medical Center in Bremerton. His first job in the US was with Group Health Cooperative (now Kaiser Permanente), where he was the labor relations administrator charged with negotiating collective bargaining agreements and directing all labor relation matters for that venerable cooperative. A native of Montreal, Denis is a graduate of the University of Montreal Law School and is a member of the Bar of Quebec. He furthered his legal education at the University of Ottawa and in 2012 received an LL.M (summa cum laude) on the strength of his thesis proposing an e-commerce legal infrastructure for Viet Nam. He lives on Bainbridge Island and is an active member of the local theater community, having been a founder of one long-running theater group and the president of another.

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