As the Director, Dr. Paulette G. Curtis is responsible for the vision, growth, and management of the University Honors Program. Before joining Florida State in September 2022, Dr. Curtis was an Assistant and Associate Dean at Ohio State University, and before that, served as Faculty Director of pre-college and undergraduate programs at the University of Notre Dame, where she worked for nine years. A social anthropologist by training, Dr. Curtis was educated at Harvard University, where she received her B.A. and PhD in Anthropology for a dissertation on American veterans of Vietnam and battlefield tourism to Vietnam, and where she later became a Resident Dean and Lecturer in Anthropology. She has taught courses on war, commemoration, and American science fiction; and her present book-length project on the National Park Service and the materials left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Artifacts of War, Sites of Resistance, draws on over a decade of ethnographic, historical, and archival research. That project reflects her interest in how institutional policy impacts practice, whether actors are engaged in navigating the commemorative politics of a controversial military engagement or navigating the labyrinthine adjudication processes of colleges and universities.

Dr. Curtis is a native of New Orleans. She is a foodie, enjoys travelling and talking film and science fiction, and is an (aspirational) semi-professional classical singer. When not engaged in the above, she can be found hanging out with her “kid,” Roscoe Parker Curtis, a three-year old black Lab mix with a swoon worthy speckled torso and paws or engaged in a bit of nostalgia, viewing old pictures of her movie-star handsome, blue-eyed Siberian husky, Clark Kent Curtis, who passed away in 2019 before the beginning of the pandemic.