The Yale College Dean’s Office (YCDO) is the administrative center of Yale College. It is comprised of the Dean of Yale College, the associate and assistant deans and directors, and their managerial and clerical staffs.
 
The YCDO is charged by the corporation to administer the undergraduate academic course of study and a variety of special educational programs such as Directed Studies, the Special Divisional Majors, and the Academic Mentorship Program.
 
The office is responsible for determining policies concerning student life, discipline, and extracurricular activities. It is also in charge of registering and overseeing all undergraduate organizations. The Dean’s Office supervises the deans of the fourteen colleges and works in close collaboration with the heads of the colleges.

Pericles Lewis, Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English at Yale University, serves as Dean of Yale College. In partnership with other university leaders and faculty members, he is responsible for guiding the curriculum, intellectual life, residential experience, and student affairs of the Yale College community. His goal is to ensure that Yale offers the world’s best undergraduate education.

Lewis earned his B.A. with first-class honors in English literature from McGill University in 1990 and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University in 1997. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Yale faculty in 1998 as assistant professor in the Comparative Literature and English departments, rising to the rank of full professor in 2007. 

He is the author of three books on the social contexts of modern literature and editor of four books. He is currently writing a book on liberal education and completing work on the fifth edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, for which he serves as the primary editor for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

From 2012 to 2017, Lewis served as founding president of Yale-NUS College, a collaboration between Yale and the National University of Singapore. Under his leadership, the college developed into a thriving model of residential liberal arts education much admired and studied throughout Asia and the world. From 2017 to 2022, he served as Yale’s vice president for global strategy and as a vice provost with responsibility for research on international matters and the support of teaching and learning across campus. In these roles, he was active in planning the launch of the Yale Institute for Global Health, the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, and the Yale Schwarzman Center.

As Dean, he reports to the President and Provost and oversees all areas of undergraduate education including admissions and financial aid, curriculum, academic advising, career preparation, fellowships, study abroad, residential life, undergraduate arts, ROTC, as well as special programs in Arts and Media, Directed Studies, Education Studies, Journalism, Language Study, and Science and Quantitative Reasoning. Together with the vice president for university life, he contributes to the university’s work in furthering diversity, equity, and inclusion in order to maximize support for all students. He also works closely with the Athletic Director, the Executive Director of the Yale Alumni Association, and the Deans of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the graduate and professional schools.

Born in Toronto, Lewis is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. His wife Sheila Hayre, a graduate of Yale Law School and former staff attorney at New Haven Legal Assistance, teaches at Quinnipiac University Law School in North Haven, Connecticut. Their son is a recent graduate of Yale College, and their daughter is a current Yale undergraduate. 

Office of the Dean Staff