Doctor of Humane Letters
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June 11, 2022
Maud S. Mandel is the 18th president of Williams College, where she is also a professor of history and Jewish studies.
As president, Mandel has overseen a collaborative strategic planning effort at Williams, including a re-envisioning of residential life as a core aspect of students’ liberal arts education and personal development. She has advanced educational work in numerous regards, from Just Futures — an initiative supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to look at maritime history as a basis for studying the relationship between European colonization, the dispossession of Native American land, and racial slavery in New England — to Williams’ decision to join the new Liberal Arts Colleges Racial Equity Leadership Alliance. She has supported progress toward the sustainability of the college’s built environment and has encouraged a culture of shared, community-wide responsibility for diversity, equity and inclusion work. Mandel has also encouraged the college’s growing relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Tribal Historic Preservation Extension Office, which represents the historical and ongoing interests of the tribe that inhabited the Berkshires region until they were displaced by European and American settlers during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Mandel is a distinguished scholar whose work examines how 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. Her publications include In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France and Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict. Her scholarship 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.
Mandel earned her B.A. from Oberlin College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan. Prior to arriving at Williams, she was a professor of history and Judaic studies and dean of the college at Brown University.