Margaret Meserve, vice president and associate provost for academic space and support at the University of Notre Dame, has been appointed the Edward H. Arnold Dean of the Hesburgh Libraries by University President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C. 

Meserve, who has served as interim library dean since August 2024, now begins a five-year term.

“The Hesburgh Libraries are vital to Notre Dame’s aspirations to be the leading global Catholic research university,” Father Dowd said. “Over her 20-year career at the University, Margaret has demonstrated exceptional leadership and dedication to Notre Dame’s mission, including most recently as interim dean, earning the respect and admiration of her colleagues. I am confident that under her guidance, the libraries will continue to advance the University’s research, teaching and learning goals while fostering Notre Dame’s engagement with the global scholarly community.”

John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost, said Meserve was well-suited to her new role. “Margaret is an unusually gifted administrator,” he said. “She possesses vision, superb communications skills and a deep commitment to Notre Dame. All of this has been in evidence in her multiple roles at Notre Dame.” 

Meserve 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

“A professor of history, Margaret is passionate about rare books and special collections, sophisticated in her use of data and a leading scholar of the history of the book,” McGreevy noted. “The search committee praised her work as interim dean, her compelling vision for the library and her commitment to deepening the engagement of the libraries with all of Notre Dame’s colleges and schools.” 

In her continued capacity as vice president and associate provost, Meserve will maintain oversight of the University of Notre Dame Press, the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. She will be handing off her current duties related to academic space and support to Vice President and Associate Provost David Go by the end of the academic year.

As dean, Meserve will lead a team of nearly 140 faculty and staff members at the flagship Hesburgh Library — which houses the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship, the Medieval Institute Library, the University Archives and Rare Books & Special Collections — and three specialty libraries located across the Notre Dame campus (architecture, business and music). 

“I’m honored and excited to continue working with our expert library faculty and staff to strengthen support for research, teaching and the preservation of knowledge at Notre Dame for generations to come,” Meserve said. “And I look forward to advancing new initiatives in information literacy, digital collections and scholarly communication that will advance the Hesburgh Libraries as a leader among university research libraries.”

Meserve 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 coming to Notre Dame in 2003. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. 

In her research and teaching, Meserve focuses on the Italian Renaissance and the histories of printing and book production, history writing, humanist culture and the papacy in the 15th and 16th centuries. Both her undergraduate and graduate courses often make use of the Hesburgh Libraries’ rare books and manuscripts as a way to introduce students to the material evidence of history. 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.