WASHINGTON—On Friday, September 15, President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate Daryle Williams to serve as a key leader in his administration. Once confirmed, Williams, who serves on the California Humanities Board of Directors, will become a Member of the National Council on the Humanities, a board of distinguished private citizens who advise the Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The National Council members are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate, and serve staggered six-year terms.
Since September 2021, Williams has served as the Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California, Riverside. His academic training is in Latin American history with a specialization in modern Brazil. As a scholar, Williams publishes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazilian history and digital slavery studies. As Dean, he advocates forcefully for educational opportunity and world-class knowledge production across the humanities, arts, and social sciences, notably at research-intensive minority-serving institutions. Williams earned an undergraduate history degree and certificate in Latin American studies from Princeton University and a Master’s and Ph.D. (1995) in history from Stanford University. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.
Williams was history faculty and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland between 1994 and 2021. During that time, he also held visiting appointments at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and Stanford. Since 2019, Williams is Co-Principal Investigator on Enslaved.org, a large digital humanities project sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, among others. Williams was born in San Francisco, California, and raised in San Diego County. He and his husband, Steven, live in historic downtown Riverside.
Other nominees announced include Jennifer L. Fain, Nominee for Inspector General, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Christopher Henry Schroeder, Nominee to be a Member of the Board of Trustees of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation.
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