Margaret Meserve

Margaret Meserve is Edward H. Arnold Dean of the Hesburgh Libraries and vice president and associate provost. In her role as dean, Meserve leads a team of 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 and Special Collections — and three specialty libraries on Notre Dame's campus. Her portfolio also includes the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, and the University of Notre Dame Press.

 

Meserve is a scholar of the Italian Renaissance and the histories of printing and book production; history writing; and the papacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Her latest book, Papal Bull: Politics, Propaganda, and Print in Renaissance Rome (Johns Hopkins, 2021), examines the publication of news and information in Rome in the first decades after the arrival of print (ca 1470-1527). The book won the 2022 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association and was highly commended for the DeLong Book Prize by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). Meserve's previous book, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Harvard, 2008), surveyed how Renaissance scholars tried to explain the rise and fall of Islamic empires, especially that of the Ottoman Turks; it won the American Historical Association's 2008 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize and the Renaissance Society of America's Phyllis Goodhart Gordon Prize for 2009. Meserve has published articles on Renaissance news printing, rhetoric, legal culture, poetry, and monsters. Three volumes of her translation of Pope Pius II's autobiographical Commentaries have appeared in the I Tatti Renaissance Library, with more on the way.

 

Meserve has won fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and Newberry Library. A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, she was previously a curator in the Incunabula Section of the British Library. At Notre Dame, she teaches courses on early modern Rome and the history of the book.