Dean, College of Liberal Arts

Larry Rodgers has served as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and professor of English at OSU since 2008.  He was Executive Dean of the Division of Arts and Sciences from 2009-2016. 

As Dean, Dr. Rodgers has overseen a wide-ranging transformation of the College of Liberal Arts that includes a reorganization into six Schools, the addition of three new PhD programs and a range of new on-campus and online masters degrees.

Dean Rodgers received his PhD in English with a minor in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1989). He also holds a BA in English from the University of Oklahoma (1982) and an MA in English from the University of Iowa (1984).

Prior to joining OSU, he served on the faculty of Kansas State University for nineteen years. He was head of English from 1995-2002 and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2002-2008. He is a well-known scholar of multicultural and regional American literature. He has written and edited half a dozen books, including Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration Novel (Illinois, 1997) and America’s Folklorist: B.A. Botkin and American Culture (Oklahoma, 2010) as well as numerous articles on twentieth-century American writers as wide ranging as Paul Laurence Dunbar, William Faulkner, Dorothy West, Edna Ferber and Sanora Babb.

Much of his research has centered around the connection between culture and place, and he’s been especially interested in the ways that American geography defines American identity, especially as writers and artists imagine the importance of place in the context of their work.