Maud S. Mandel
President; Professor of History; Program in Jewish Studies
Williams College

Maud S. Mandel, Williams College 18th president, earned her B.A. from Oberlin College in 1989 and her master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan in 1993 and 1998, respectively. Following her arrival, President Mandel launched a collaborative strategic planning process involving faculty, staff, students, alumni, families and friends. Thus far, outputs from this work have included increased attention to the role of technology and the creative arts in a liberal arts education as well as the establishment of the first all-grant financial aid program in the country. In addition, she has encouraged a culture of shared, community-wide responsibility for diversity, equity and inclusion work and continued Williams’ investment in the sustainability of its built environment. President Mandel is also an accomplished historian, whose scholarship looks at how policies and practices of inclusion and exclusion in 20th-century France have affected religious and ethnic minorities, most notably Jews, Armenians and Muslim North Africans. She has explored 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 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.

 

Selected Publications

Armenians and Jews in Twentieth Century France (Duke University Press, 2003)

Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Colonialism and the Jews, eds., Ethan Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel. Indiana University Press, 2017.

“’The French Jewish Community Speaks to you with One Voice’: Dissent and the Shaping of French Jewish Politics since World War II,” (co-written with Ethan Katz), The Jews of Modern France, ed. Zvi Jonathan Kaplan and Nadia Malinovich, Litmann Press, 2016.

“Simone Weil (1909-1943)” for Thinking Jewish Modernity, eds. Jacques Picard, Jacques Revel, Michael P. Steinberg, and Idith Zertal. Princeton University Press, 2016.