Margaret Meserve is Interim Edward H. Arnold Dean, Hesburgh Libraries and University of Notre Dame Press; Vice President and Associate Provost for Academic Space and Support. In this role, she works closely with the University architect, development, and academic leaders to plan and manage new construction projects and the renovation of academic spaces both on and off campus. Her portfolio also includes the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.
Meserve was appointed to her current role in July 2023. She 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 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 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 the ways Renaissance historians explained 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. At Notre Dame, she teaches courses on the Italian Renaissance, the history of Rome, and the history of the book.
Meserve earned her bachelor’s degree in Classics at Harvard and a Masters and Ph.D. in Renaissance history from the Warburg Institute of the University of London. She has won fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. She is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.