Victoria DeFrancesco Soto

Victoria DeFrancesco Soto is dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas and previously served as assistant dean at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and is a political analyst for NBC News and Telemundo. Victoria is the first Latina dean at a presidential institution, and she was named one of the top 12 scholars in the country by Diverse magazine. Victoria previously taught at Northwestern University and Rutgers and received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University.

Her areas of expertise include civic engagement, women, immigration, Latinos, and political psychology. Underlying all of her research interests is the applicability of high-quality, rigorous research to on-the-ground policy realities. Victoria has spent over two decades bridging academic, practitioner, community, and media realms in her quest to cultivate public service engagement across national landscape. An award-winning professor, Victoria is deeply passionate about the intersection of curricular and community-based learning and cultivating dynamic classroom environments that are responsive to a real-world context. Throughout her more than 20 years in a classroom, Victoria has designed and implemented curricular innovation to challenge both herself and her students to think bigger and be maximally impactful.