Law Professor Kerry Abrams Named U.Va.’s Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs

Kerry Abrams headshot

As vice provost for faculty affairs, law professor Kerry Abrams will oversee the University’s faculty recruitment and retention initiatives.

Kerry Abrams, Albert Clark Tate Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, has been named vice provost for faculty affairs, Executive Vice President and Provost John D. Simon announced today. The new two-year administrative appointment is effective May 25.

As vice provost for faculty affairs, Abrams will oversee the University’s faculty recruitment and retention initiatives in its ongoing efforts to define the best in teaching, research and service.

“Kerry is well known in the University community and has earned the respect of her colleagues on the faculty, and I am confident she will enhance significantly the area of faculty affairs at the University of Virginia,” Simon said. “I am delighted she has agreed to serve in this critical leadership position.”

In her new role, Abrams will play a central role in working with the University and the schools in areas regarding faculty promotion and the recruitment and retention of a diverse faculty. In addition, she will develop and implement policies, creative initiatives and metrics to address work-life balance, dual-career hires, peer review and salary equity.

Abrams succeeds Gertrude Fraser, an associate professor of anthropology, who announced late last year that she would return to teaching full-time after leading recruitment and retention efforts for several years.

Abrams joined the U.Va. faculty in 2005 and was promoted to full professor in 2010. Her primary teaching and research interests are in the areas of citizenship law, immigration law, constitutional law, legal history and family law. She has written numerous articles on the intersection of immigration law and family law, the history of immigration law and the marriage equality movement.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Swarthmore College and her law degree from Stanford University, where she was president of the Moot Court Board. After law school, she clerked for Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana and practiced law for several years in the litigation department of the New York City firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler LLP. From 2002 to 2005, she was acting assistant professor of lawyering at New York University School of Law.

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