Faculty Hiring Initiatives
The College of Arts and Sciences is excited to announce two faculty hiring constellations intended to bring together tenure-line faculty members whose research, scholarship, and creative activity can help bring new, interdisciplinary perspectives to the areas of Societal Resilience to Climate Change and Envisioning and Narrating Emerging Futures.
We invite inquiries from outstanding teacher-scholars who want to join the University of Tennessee’s world-class faculty and work with our colleagues in the College of Arts and Sciences to make life and lives better.
Included here is information about recent and current searches for both constellations.
Societal Resilience to Climate Change
Climate change has already become, and will remain, a defining global challenge of the 21st century. With communities and societies now experiencing acute direct and indirect effects of climate change, including extreme weather events, changes in global migration, and political conflicts among nation-states, public and expert attention is increasingly shifting towards developing societal capabilities for disaster preparedness, prevention, mitigation, and resilience.
The Societal Resilience to Climate Change Constellation will leverage the college’s existing instructional and research strengths in disciplines and transdisciplinary areas that examine climate change and societal resilience. The focus of this hiring initiative closely aligns with the scope of the Institute for Climate and Community Resilience (ICCR) as well as graduate and undergraduate academic programs that are in high demand. Strengthening research and instructional capabilities in this focus area helps make life and lives better and connects with existing UT-wide initiatives focusing on health and wellness as well as circular bioeconomy and global energy ecosystems.
Open Faculty Positions for Fall 2026
- Assistant/Associate Professor of Climate Change & Resiliency, Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences
- Assistant Professor of Climate Extremes & Impacts, Geography and Sustainability
Position Successfully Filled for Fall 2025
- Lluis Salo-Salgado, Assistant Professor, Barbara McDonald Endowed Professorship in Energy Transition, Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences
Please contact Gina Owens, Interim Divisional Dean for Social Sciences, with any questions.
Envisioning and Narrating Emerging Futures
As Volunteers, our goal is not simply to study the world; we want to change it for the better. It is not enough, for example, to identify structural inequities that lead to health disparities; we also want to inspire and work with people and policymakers to remove inequities to help make life and lives better. One way to put our scholarship and creative activity into practice is to construct narratives that elevate understanding of how the future can be different from the present. With the increasing pace of global environmental, social, and technological change, it will also be important to help strengthen capabilities to craft narratives that both explain these changes and present a vision of alternative futures to help inoculate societies against extremism and demagoguery. Likewise, it will be important to foster greater capacity to recognize and refute narratives that have been designed to promote and elevate conflict and polarization.
Investments in the Envisioning and Narrating Emerging Futures strategic focus area will expand the college’s capabilities in translational research. The focus of this hiring imitative aligns with programs supported by the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts that focus on applying scholarly insights to make life and lives better in Tennessee and across the nation. Likewise, these investments will help better prepare our students for visual storytelling and content creation jobs that are vital to Tennessee’s growing gaming industry and motion picture industry, which rank among the top five states nationwide in total state-level employment. The initiative also is intended to support efforts to help prepare students to compete for new jobs in employment sectors that do not yet exist.
Open Faculty Positions for Fall 2026
- Assistant/Associate Professor of Filmmaking, School of Art
- Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Department of English
Positions Successfully Filled for Fall 2025
Daniel Bird Tobin, Assistant Professor of Applied Theatre, Department of Theatre
Bucky Miller, Assistant Professor of Photography, School of Art
Zoe Weldon-Yochim, Assistant Professor of Art History – Museum Studies, School of Art
Brandee Easter, Assistant Professor of Digital and New Media, Department of English
Jessica Wilkerson, Associate Professor of Public History – Appalachia, Department of History
Rachel Schneider, Assistant Professor of Religion in Public Life, Department of Religious Studies