New Dean of Branford College Announced

May 9, 2022
Yale College Dean’s Office

May 9, 2022

To the Fellows, Staff, and Students of Branford College:

Last month, Dean Sarah Insley announced that she would be stepping down as dean at the end of this academic year. Head of College Enrique De La Cruz and I are extremely grateful to her for her service to Branford.

I am delighted to report that, after consulting with Professor De La Cruz and a committee of Branford students and fellows, I have appointed Maria del Mar Galindo to be the next dean of Branford College.

Dean Galindo is of course well known to many of you because she so ably served as Branford’s interim dean earlier this academic year. She returns with the benefit of her experience not only in Branford but also, since March, as interim dean in Silliman College.

Because it was just a few months ago that Professor De La Cruz introduced Dean Galindo to you, much of what he told you about her then still applies today. Before her October 2021 appointment as Branford’s interim dean, she held positions at the Beinecke, at the Yale Writing Center, and with the Academic Strategies Program in the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning.

In the English Department, Dean Galindo has taught several iterations of ENGL 114 and a course on forgery and the authentic; she has also taught with the Warrior-Scholar Project. She’s passionate about helping students see college as a place where they can set their own goals and forge their own paths, and about creating tools and systems at Yale that celebrate and center students from all kinds of backgrounds.

She was born in Querétaro, Mexico, and raised in Mexico City, though she has spent a considerable part of her adult life living in either the US or the UK. She received her BA in English Literature from Oxford in 2008 and has an MSc in Global Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an MA and MPhil in English Literature from Yale. She is working toward her PhD in English Literature; her research focuses on Early Modern people who were reading, writing, and learning at the margins of established groups, and on what they can teach us about the long history of being “underrepresented” in scholarly spaces.

Before coming to Yale in 2016, Dean Galindo worked for the United Nations for several years, and was lucky enough to be posted to Mexico City, Geneva, Damascus, and Accra, with brief stints in Rio de Janeiro and Istanbul. She worked on chemical disarmament in Syria and was part of the Ebola epidemic response in West Africa in 2014-2015. She has also worked in consulting and in the nonprofit sector, working primarily with international civil society leaders.

Dean Galindo lives in New Haven with her husband, Marcus Alaimo, who is also an English Literature scholar, and their beloved but often quite strange dog, Merkel. She really enjoys the outdoors, and once spent a month dogsledding and winter camping in the Boundary Waters in MN. She’s loved hockey from childhood, despite growing up in a country with no real hockey culture or ice, and also enjoys horror movies, cooking, creative writing, embroidering and painting (quite badly, on both counts), classic rock, C-dramas, and gardening.

The dean’s search committee, chaired by Professor De La Cruz, did outstanding work in identifying and attracting such an excellent candidate for the Branford deanship, and for its service I thank its members: Andrew Jackson ‘22; Olvia Schlaepfer ‘23; Juliana Calver ‘24; Anika Seth ‘25; Stephen Blum ‘74, resident fellow; Connie Gersick Ph.D. ‘84, associate fellow; and Anna Smist ‘21, fellow.

Please join me in welcoming Dean Galindo back to the Branford Community.

Sincerely,

Marvin M. Chun
Dean of Yale College
Richard M. Colgate Professor of Psychology; Neuroscience; Cognitive Science