(2018 Jul-) Mandel, Maud S.

Williams College President 2018-

President-elect Maud S. Mandel was unanimously selected as the college’s 18th president by the Board of Trustees on March 11, 2018.

A strong proponent of the liberal arts, President-elect Mandel earned a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1989 and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan in 1993 and 1998, respectively. She came to Brown in 1997 as a visiting assistant professor in modern Jewish history and permanently joined the faculty in 2001 as a professor of history and Judaic studies. She held several leadership positions in the history department and was chair of the Judaic studies program from 2012 to 2014. In 2014, she was named a full professor of history and Judaic studies and simultaneously dean of the college.

In her scholarship, President-elect Mandel examines the ways policies and practices of inclusion and exclusion in 20th-century France have affected ethnic and religious minorities, most notably Jews, Armenians and Muslim North Africans. She explores these themes in publications including In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France (Duke University Press, 2003) and Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014). She was also a co-editor of Colonialism and the Jews (Indiana University Press, 2017). Her work has been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society, among others.

(1967- )