Margaret Meserve

Interim Edward H. Arnold Dean, Hesburgh Libraries and University of Notre Dame Press

Vice President and Associate Provost for Academic Space and Support

Margaret Meserve was appointed Interim Edward H. Arnold Dean of Hesburgh Libraries and University of Notre Dame Press on August 1, 2024. A professor of history, she also serves as vice president and associate provost for academic space and support. Meserve previously served as senior director of academic space in the office of the provost. From 2015–21, she was associate dean for the humanities and faculty affairs in the College of Arts and Letters.

A historian of the Italian Renaissance, Meserve studies the history of book printing, humanist culture, and the papacy in the 15th and 16th centuries. She is the author of the award-winning Papal Bull: Print, Propaganda, and Politics in Renaissance Rome (Johns Hopkins, 2021), which surveys how the popes used the printing press to publish news, propaganda, and disinformation in the early decades after Gutenberg. Her previous book, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Harvard, 2008), surveyed how Renaissance historians accounted for the rise and fall of Islamic empires, especially that of the Ottoman Turks. She is currently working on a multivolume translation of the Commentaries of Pope Pius II, the only pope ever to write his autobiography while sitting on the papal throne, based on manuscripts in the Vatican Library and Biblioteca Corsiniana in Rome. At Notre Dame, she teaches courses on the Italian Renaissance, the history of Rome, and the history of the book.

Meserve earned her B.A. in Classics at Harvard and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Renaissance history from the Warburg Institute of the University of London. She served for two years as a curator in the Incunabula Section of the British Library in London. She has won fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and the Newberry Library in Chicago and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.