Jeff Aziz, PhD

Jeff Aziz received his PhD in Critical and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. Jeff prefers to see culture “in the round,” exploring the manner in which literary, religious, artistic, dramatic, and scientific representations are richly connected and interdependent. An undergraduate at heart, he is interested in many disciplinary areas. He teaches courses on Shakespeare, early modern literature, drama, museum studies, religious studies, and the cultural history of science, medicine, and anatomy, often in curious combinations. He is at home in museum research collections and has traveled worldwide with a colleague to examine specimens of the extinct marsupial known as the “Tasmanian Wolf” or thylacine. He is interested in the early-modern history of medical anatomy, and he will be taking Pitt students on a study abroad in Amsterdam, Netherlands in the summer of 2026, “Bones, Books, and Bodies,” exploring in rich detail the cultural context of Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp.

As academic integrity officer for the undergraduate division of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, he has helped to lead the university conversation about emergent artificial Intelligence. He is one of the original proposers of Artificial Intelligence Across the Disciplines, the Dietrich School’s faculty AI-literacy seminar.

As a university academic integrity officer, Jeff is significantly involved in cultivating a “culture of trust” among university students. He is a regular speaker and teacher on artificial-intelligence ethics and biomedical ethics, with an emphasis on the history of the use of human materials in medical teaching.

Jeff is director of the Certificate in Health Humanities and regularly teaches the capstone for that program. Jeff has taught at Pitt’s Provost Academy, a first-year enculturation program originally welcoming first-generation students and now open to others, in every year since its inception. With his colleague and fight coach Tonya Lynn, he currently teaches the Provost Academy course Fight Bravely: Stage Combat for Everyone: a one-week intensive course on stage combat and fight choreography.

Jeff designed and introduced the literature program’s Apocalypse, Literature and Science and Unruly Bodies courses. His teaching has involved several early-modern material practices, including letterpress printing, anatomical dissection, and stage combat. He is fascinated by the history of the graphic display of information, from Galileo to Fritz Kahn to the work of his own students. He has studied historical sword fighting for the dramatic stage, and earned his first skills-proficiency certification in rapier-and-dagger from the Society of American Fight Directors in the summer of 2025. He is the faculty advisor to Pitt’s fencing club and to Steel City Stage Combat.

Jeff is an assistant dean in the Dietrich School and serves as the academic integrity officer for the undergraduate division. He is president of the Xi chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. He is a long‑serving advisor in the English Department and a 2020 recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award. In the spring of 2026, Jeff joined Pitt’s Institute for Bioethics as a core faculty member.