As vice chancellor for global affairs, Ariel C. Armony leads the University of Pittsburgh’s global strategy and engagement. He also directs the University Center for International Studies (UCIS), home to top-ranked thematic and area studies centers.
A professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, Armony has published extensively on civil society, democracy, human rights, South-South relations, and the globalization of cities. He received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center and Fulbright, Rockefeller and Kellogg foundations. He is a frequent commentator for U.S. and international media.
After his arrival at Pitt in 2015, Armony led a major transformation of the institution’s global infrastructure and operations to better position the University as a leader in internationalization. This work has been recognized with the nation’s most prestigious honors in the field, such as NAFSA’s Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization. In 2022, for the first time in Pitt’s history, all six of the University’s international and global centers received National Resource Center and Foreign Language and Area Studies awards from the U.S. Department of Education. These competitive awards place Pitt among the nation’s leaders in international and area studies.
Under Armony’s leadership, UCIS spearheaded a faculty cluster hire in Latinx studies, established a new Center for Ethnic Studies Research and launched a Center for African Studies.
Armony, an immigrant from Argentina, is a proud Pitt alum (Ph.D. in political science). Prior to joining the University, he was the Martha Weeks Professor of Latin American Studies and founding director of the Miami Institute for the Advanced Study of the Americas at the University of Miami and held the Audrey and Sheldon Katz Distinguished Chair at Colby College.
Having lived in four continents, Armony wrote for television, directed theater and crossed Thorong La in the Himalayas, one of the highest mountain passes in the world. He is working on a novel, a family saga spanning four generations.