Associate Provost and Chief Academic Digital Officer

Elliott Visconsi, Associate Professor of English

Elliott Visconsi, associate professor of English, is associate provost and chief academic digital officer (CADO) at Notre Dame. A scholar of early modern English literature, freedom of expression, and First Amendment law, he has been at Notre Dame since 2010.

As associate provost and CADO, Visconsi leverages the resources of Notre Dame Learning (composed of the Office of Digital Learning and the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence) to lead the University’s approach to innovative learning strategies, including online/digital learning, inter-institutional collaboration, and experimental models for the future of education.

Starting in March 2020, Visconsi chaired the Faculty Task Force on Instructional Continuity, guiding the University-wide pivot to emergency remote teaching and learning in response to the pandemic, and he has continued to play a lead role in adapting these technologies and strategies to support on-campus instruction. He is also a committed advocate for liberal education and a believer in the transformative potential of the residential undergraduate experience.

As a teacher, Visconsi tries to build a student-centered pedagogy in all of his courses and has experimented with class formats (lecture, seminar, online, hybrid), emerging pedagogies, and active strategies (role-playing games, moot court, team competitions) to empower effective student learning in the cross-disciplinary humanities.

The persistent aim of his research is to understand how law is constituted and negotiated within culture as well as how literary texts provoke and challenge those habits of thought necessary for judgment, citizenship, and belonging in democratic societies. He is beginning research on a new study of the history and future of the experimental tradition in higher education.

Visconsi holds a B.A. from the College of the Holy Cross, a Ph.D. from UCLA, and an M.S.L. from Yale Law School. He often presents on matters related to academic freedom, campus freedom of speech in the digital age, and academic innovation to audiences at colleges and universities in the United States and abroad.