Anne D’Alleva, professor of art and art history and former head of department, has been named dean of the School of Fine Arts. Her appointment, announced by Provost Mun Choi, took effect July 1.
D’Alleva has been teaching at UConn since fall 1999, as a joint appointment to Art History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She served as a member of the University’s Academic Vision committee, where she was a strong advocate for the arts, and was chair of the UConn Reads steering committee for 2013-14 and 2014-15. She also served two stints as associate dean of the School of Fine Arts.
D’Alleva’s research interests include the arts of 18th and 19th-century Tahiti and the Society Islands, examining the ways that gender and the visual arts shaped interactions between Society Islanders and explorers, missionaries, and colonizers. She is also interested in contemporary Pacific Islands art and issues of gender, visual art, and performance.
Her publications include Arts of the Pacific Islands (Yale University Press, 2010, 2nd edition) and an essay “On 1890s Tahiti” in Gauguin/Polynesia (2011), the catalogue for an international traveling exhibition organized by the Art Centre, Basel, Switzerland.
She came to UConn from a postdoctoral fellowship at Australian National University. She earned her undergraduate degree in art history from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. from Columbia University with a graduate certificate in feminist theory.
The Provost has also named Nina Rovinelli Heller as interim dean of the School of Social Work, effective July 1.
Heller, the Zachs Professor of Social Work and director of the graduate program, joined the UConn faculty in 1994 and has also worked as a clinician in private practice. She has taught in the MSW and Ph.D. programs in the areas of casework, social work practice, and theory and mental health; won the Alumni Association Faculty Excellence in Teaching award in 2000; and was named a University Teaching Fellow in 2000-2001.
Her research and scholarship are in the areas of suicide and suicide prevention, social work theory, integrative approaches to practice, and mental health.
She is co-editor of several books: Enhancing Psychodynamic Theories with Cognitive Behavioral Theory (1998); Social Work and Social Problems: A Mental Health Perspective (2010); and Beyond the Risk Paradigm in Mental Health Policy and Practice, which is currently under contract.
As a consultant to the State of Connecticut Suicide Advisory Board, Heller led the development of the state suicide prevention plan and serves on several related statewide committees. She is a member of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention Taskforce on Clinical Workforce Preparedness, and is certified by the American Association of Suicidology as a psychological autopsy investigator.
She is also co-PI on a three-year SAMHSA clinical training grant Transitioning Youth at Risk, a collaborative effort between the UConn School of Social Work and the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.
