Provost awarded endowed faculty history chair
Special to The Observer
Nathan Hatch, the University's provost, has been awarded an endowed faculty chair in history, according to University President Father Edward Malloy.
While continuing to serve as provost, Hatch now also becomes the Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History, in recognition of his status as one of the most influential scholars in the study of the history of religion in America.
His book, "The Democratiz-ation of American Christianity," published by Yale University Press in 1989, was called by professor Gordon Wood of Brown University, "the best book on religion in the early Republic that has ever been written."
The book also was chosen in a survey of 2,000 historians and sociologists as one of the two most important books in the study of American religion.
A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1975, Hatch earlier published "The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England," also with Yale University Press. He has edited two books with Oxford University Press and another, "The Professions in American History," with the University of Notre Dame Press.
A summa cum laude graduate of Wheaton College, Hatch earned his master's and doctoral degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities and has been awarded research grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Antiquarian Society.
Since becoming Notre Dame's provost, the University's second ranking officer, in 1996, Hatch has concentrated his efforts in three areas:
u nurturing academic centers of excellence, including expansion of the University's Keough Institute for Irish Studies and Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the establishment of its Keck Center for Transgene Research, and the enhancement of its Medieval Institute;
u revitalizing undergraduate education through the creation of the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning, the Kaneb Teaching Awards and new opportunities in off-campus and international studies;
u recruiting outstanding faculty.
Hatch has been responsible for a number of major academic appointments, including new deans of the Colleges of Engineering, Arts and Letters, Business Administration and the Law School, a new chair of the School of Architecture, a new director of libraries and new assistant provosts for enrollment and academic outreach.
He also has launched a new initiative to enhance Catholic intellectual life at Notre Dame with the establishment of the Erasmus Institute, a national center for scholarship informed by Catholic thought.
As vice president for Graduate Studies and Research at Notre Dame from 1989-96, Hatch instilled a vision of "small but superb" postbaccalaureate programs that attracted more and better students to the University, as well as substantial new resources.
He served as acting dean of Notre Dame's College of Arts and Letters, its largest academic unit, in 1988-89, and from 1983-88 he was the college's associate dean.
Also during that time he founded and directed the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA), which fostered a six-fold increase in external funding of faculty in the humanities and social sciences and assisted faculty members in winning 21 NEH fellowships from 1985-91, an achievement that ranked Notre Dame among the top 10 private universities, nationally.
Hatch directed graduate studies in the history department from 1980-83, during which time he also won the college's Paul Fenlon Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
Hatch's chair is Notre Dame's third Tackes chair in history, all created from the estate of Andrew V. Tackes, a native of Austria-Hungary who lived most of his adult life as an electrician in St. Louis, Mo. At his death in 1968 at age 82, he had accumulated a large estate through wise investments and left gifts to a number of Catholic charities and institutions, including Notre Dame.
All News Stories for Wednesday, September 1, 1999
