Jason Zentz is Associate Dean in the FAS Dean’s Office. He leads the team that manages all ladder faculty search processes in the FAS and serves as an expert resource to faculty, chairs, and divisional deans on FAS policies and procedures across a broad range of topics, including ladder faculty reviews and extensions. He works closely with department chairs and language program directors in the allocation of teaching resources and the appointment and review of language lectors and introductory English lecturers. Jason’s portfolio also includes maintaining the FAS ladder faculty slot book, advising on the design of the Porter faculty career path database, and preparing detailed analysis and projections to inform search authorizations, budget planning, and long-term academic strategy. He serves as a staff representative on the FAS Steering Committee, the Faculty Resource Committee, the Teaching Resource Advisory Committee, the Language Study Committee, and the Course of Study Committee.
Jason has been a member of the FAS Dean’s Office since 2016; prior responsibilities include leading the FAS academic unit review process, managing the transition to the new tenure and promotions system (FASTAP 2016), serving as technical liaison for a website redesign and the migration to the Yale Message communications system, and organizing orientation events for new FAS faculty.
Jason is an alumnus of Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he earned his PhD in linguistics. For his dissertation research on the structure of questions in Shona, a Bantu language spoken in Zimbabwe, he received the 1st Place Student Abstract Award from the Linguistic Society of America. Upon graduation, Jason spent part of his time as a postdoctoral associate in linguistics, investigating variation in sentence structure across speakers of North American English through the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project.
In addition to his graduate degrees from Yale, Jason holds a BA in linguistics and music from the University of Rochester, where he studied voice at the Eastman School of Music. He continues to sing as a member of the Yale Camerata.