The board of trustees of Williams College, the highly selective liberal arts educational institution in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has chosen Maud S. Mandel as the eighteenth president of the college. She will take office on July 1.
Williams College enrolls about 2,100 undergraduates and less than 100 graduate students. Women make up 49 percent of the undergraduate student body, according to the latest U.S. Department of Education figures. However, the latest WIAReport survey reports that women are just 44.3 percent of this year’s entering class.
Dr. Mandel currently serves as dean of the college and as a professor of Judaic studies and history at Brown University in Providence, Rhode island. She joined the faculty at Brown in 2001 and was promoted to full professor in 2014.
Professor Mandel is the author of Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014) and In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in 20th-Century France (Duke University Press, 2003). She is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, where she majored in English and earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.