Melissa Nobles was named as the next dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Nobles is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and chair of the department of political science at the university. She will begin her new duties as dean on July 1.
Professor Nobles joined the faculty at MIT in 1995. Her current research involves compiling a database of race-related murders in the American South from 1930 to 1954. She is the author of Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford University Press, 2000) and The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Dr. Nobles is a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she majored in history. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.