The University of Notre Dame has appointed Margaret Meserve the Edward H. Arnold Dean of the Hesburgh Libraries for a five-year term effective November 2025.
Margaret will continue to serve as vice president and associate provost, in which capacity she will maintain oversight of the University of Notre Dame Press, the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, and the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. She will hand off her current duties related to academic space and support by the end of the academic year.
In her career at Notre Dame, Margaret served as interim Edward H. Arnold Dean of Hesburgh Libraries and University Press August 2024–November 2025. She was appointed vice president and associate provost for Academic Space and Support in 2023. Prior to that, she served as associate dean for the Humanities and Faculty Affairs and director of Space Planning in the College of Arts and Letters and co-director of the Glynn Family Honors Program.
Margaret received her bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard and her master’s and doctorate in Renaissance history from the University of London. She taught at Princeton for two years before moving to Notre Dame in 2003. She has won fellowships from the US National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
Her most recent book, Papal Bull: Print, Politics, and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome, won the American Catholic Historical Association’s Helen & Howard Marraro Prize for the most distinguished work in Italian history published in 2021. She is currently working on a translation of the Commentaries of Pope Pius II, a Renaissance pope known for his scholarship and the only pope ever to compose an autobiography while in office.
For more about this appointment, see the Hesburgh Libraries news release.
