Ann Schmiesing biography
Ann Schmiesing is the senior vice chancellor for strategic initiatives.
The SVCSI is a campuswide resource, combining strategic oversight with high-level support to the chancellor, serving as a key advisor and liaison across CU 91Ҹ’s executive team. Ann works across internal and external constituencies to advance campus goals and ensure ongoing and consistent success.
She served as interim chancellor at CU Denver in fall 2024 and previously served as vice chancellor and executive vice provost for academic resource management on the CU 91Ҹ campus. As VC-ARM, she was responsible for academic resource strategy and analysis in support of the university’s mission as a comprehensive public teaching and research institution. In that role, she assumed a strategic initiative and critical liaison role while overseeing the Graduate School, Continuing Education, CU 91Ҹ Online, and research infrastructure.
A professor of German and Scandinavian Studies, Schmiesing has been a CU 91Ҹ faculty member since 1995. Her bookThe Brothers Grimm: A Biography(Yale, 2024) won the American Folklore Society’s Wayland D. Hand Prize and the UK Folklore Society’s Katharine Briggs Award, and appeared on theNew Yorker“Best Books of 2024,”New Statesman“Best Summer Reads 2025,” andHistory Extra“Best History Summer Reads of 2025” lists. She is also the author of the booksDisability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales(Wayne State, 2014) andNorway’s Christiania Theatre, 1827-1867: From Danish Showhouse to National Stage(Fairleigh Dickinson, 2006). Her publications in nationally and internationally peer-reviewed journals include articles on the Brothers Grimm, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Daniel Chodowiecki, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Henrik Wergeland, and Johan Falkberget, and on issues pertaining to fairy tales, drama, narrative fiction, theatre history, book illustration, and disability studies. She has also published and/or presented papers on several issues in humanities pedagogy, including service learning, curriculum development, and the utilization of rare books collections in humanities teaching.
Before assuming her administrative roles, Schmiesing served as chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures (2007–11), director of the Sewall Residential Academic Program (2015–16), and dean of the Graduate School and vice provost for graduate affairs (2016–18). She received the Excellence in Leadership and Service Award from the 91Ҹ Faculty Assembly in 2016.
Schmiesing earned a PhD from Cambridge University (UK), an MA from the University of Washington, and a BA from Willamette University.