Dr. Kate Murphy will begin her role as the College of Liberal Arts interim dean on Monday, Aug. 19.
Cal Poly Academic Affairs announced in an email Wednesday afternoon she will hold the position through Aug. 31, 2025, or until a new permanent dean is made.
The announcement follows the departure of current CLA Dean Philip Williams who accepted a position at Oregon State University as the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts.
In navigating changes at Cal Poly, Murphy hopes to use this transition period for new opportunities in areas like supporting DEI, the teacher-scholar model and international experiences, she wrote in an email to Mustang News.
In 2007, Murphy started in Cal Poly’s history department and received the department’s Teacher of the Year award in 2008. She also served as the department’s chair.
Most recently as associate dean for student success, she worked with Williams to increase the number of associate degrees for transfers that the college accepts, revising the transfer selection criteria, and increasing articulations with community college courses, according to Murphy.
Murphy also filled roles such as the graduate coordinator for the history master’s program and an administrative fellow in the CLA Dean’s office.
As an administrative fellow, she led the college’s academic enrollment planning. The process involved learning about each department and thinking about the value and direction of the liberal arts, she said.
“That was really invaluable experience as it shaped all my subsequent work and will be something I will continue [to] draw upon in this role,” Murphy wrote.
She completed her undergraduate education at the University of Virginia studying history before getting her master’s and doctorate in history at Johns Hopkins University.
Murphy described the opportunity to combine liberal arts with a polytechnic university as “unique,” recounting her experience receiving a history degree at Johns Hopkins, known for its medical school.
“But what you learn in college is not just in the classroom; you also learn from the people you’re surrounded by in your dorms, in clubs, and in your friend group,” Murphy wrote. “When those people include other students studying lots of different types of disciplines —like engineering or architecture or science — you also start to learn other ways of approaching problems and learn from the ways you each think.”
Her research focuses on the history of science and the slave trade. She has written many articles for leading academic journals and published a book titled “Captivity’s Collections: Science, Natural History and the Transatlantic British Slave Trade.”.
Murphy’s work also has received support from the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Studies for her research, according to the email.
A national search for a permanent dean will begin soon.
