Michael Clark has been named acting dean of the UC Irvine School of Humanities.

Clark, who specializes in Colonial American literature, has been a member of the UCI faculty since 1983. He now serves as chairman of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He earned a doctorate in English from UCI in 1977 and taught for several years at the University of Michigan.

Also, Steven Carter was appointed chairman of the East Asian Languages and Literature Department.

Carter has been a professor at UCI since 1990 and is a former Fulbright scholar. He has written several books on Japanese literature.

Carter replaces Pauline Yu, who moved to UCLA this year to become of the dean of humanities in the College of Letters and Science.