On this page: Message from the DeanAbout Lisa Shapiro
Message from the Dean
As Dean of the Faculty of Arts and as a Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, I take pride in the community of faculty, staff and students with whom I am privileged to work with. McGill’s original name was the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, and still today, we all want to learn more and to improve the world we share.
The Faculty of Arts at McGill is a complex thing, but our mission is a simple one. Together, we work to improve our understanding of contexts in a range of places and times, to articulate what is valued, and the reasons for evaluation, and to leverage those insights to shape decision making. Whether our faculty members are advising policy makers or teaching students, we strive to facilitate a spirit of inquiry in which we confront hard questions and together work to find robust answers to them. Students in our Faculty learn from professors who are leaders in the humanities, social sciences, public policy, information sciences, social work and religious studies, and who integrate their field-leading research into their teaching. Over the course of their education, they hone their ability to think critically and imaginatively while participating actively in the McGill community. Today’s students become the leaders of tomorrow, with a strong commitment to civic engagement.
The Faculty of Arts was founded nearly 180 years ago and is the largest at McGill, with 13 departments, 4 schools, 4 institutes, and two teaching that focus on writing and French instruction. We are also home to a range of interdisciplinary programs and an array of research centres. With over 9000 students and 300 faculty members from Québec, Canada, and over 100 different countries, the Faculty of Arts plays a central role in university life. Our diverse community encompasses a wide spectrum of research interests and innovative scholarship with both a local and a global reach.
Equity, diversity and inclusion are explicitly connected to our educational mission. The Faculty of Arts is home to the Indigenous Studies and Community Engagement Initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In connection with McGill’s Action Plan to Address Anti-Black Racism, we are welcoming new scholars, students, research programs and pedagogical changes across disciplines and in collaboration with the larger community across campus.
Our undergraduate and graduate programs offer a range of opportunities for focused study as well as experiential learning. Many of our students also benefit from the Arts Internship program and Study Away that help students to enlarge their perspectives and translate what they learn in the classroom into new domains.
Our Arts community is bound by the commitment to education and the pursuit of knowledge with a shared conviction of the importance of the arts in understanding context, articulating values, and shaping decision making to improve our shared world.
About Lisa Shapiro
Professor Shapiro joined McGill as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of Philosophy on October 1st, 2022.
Professor Shapiro earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in Physics and Philosophy from Wesleyan University. She has also studied at the Université de Paris IV (Sorbonne) and X (Nanterre). She specializes in 17th and 18th century philosophy. Her research is focused on questions about the nature of a human being, the nature of thinking, and the place of emotions in human understanding. In exploring these questions, she is committed to the recovery and rehabilitation of the work of women in the history of philosophy. To this end, she is the Principal Investigator of the SSHRC Partnership project, “,” an international collaboration engaged in retrieving philosophical works by women and individuals from other marginalized groups, with the goal of making the practice of philosophy more inclusive and diverse.
Prior to joining McGill, she was Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. During her career there, Professor Shapiro served as Acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Associate Dean (Graduate Studies and Research/Research and International) in the Faculty, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy.
View Dean Lisa Shapiro's CV .