Nathan O. Hatch

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Nathan O. Hatch is president of Wake Forest University, USA, having been officially installed on 2005-10-20.

Born and raised in Columbia, South Carolina, Hatch graduated summa cum laude from Wheaton College (1968) and earned his master's (1972) and doctoral (1974) 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 NEH, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Antiquarian Society.

Hatch became a member of the faculty at the University of Notre Dame in 1975, and directed graduate studies in Notre Dame's history department from 1980-83, during which time he was also awarded the college's Paul Fenlon Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He served as associate dean of Notre Dame's College of Arts and Letters, its largest academic unit, from 1983-88, and from 1988-89 was the college's acting dean. Also during that time he founded and directed the Institute of 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 Notre Dame faculty members in winning 21 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowships from 1985-91. In 1999 Hatch was appointed the Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at Notre Dame.

Since 1989, Hatch had been Notre Dame's vice president for graduate studies and research. In 1996, he became the university's provost — the third person to hold the position since its establishment in 1970. As provost he was the Notre Dame's second ranking officer and, under the direction of the president, exercised overall responsibility for the academic enterprise. He held this office until 2005, at which time he became president of Wake Forest.

Recently, Hatch has been subject to criticism for his decision to expand Wake Forest University's student body. As a small, liberal arts college with a valued sense of community, many believe Hatch's decision to expand the student body is solely economically driven, and ignores many of the values on which the undergraduate college was built.

Dr. Hatch is regularly cited as one of the most influential scholars in the study of the history of religion in America. His book The Democratization of American Christianity, published by Yale University Press in 1989, garnered three awards, including the 1989 Albert Outler Prize in Ecumenical Church History and the 1990 John Hope Franklin Prize as the best book in American studies. Professor Gordon Wood of Brown University called it "the best book on religion in the early Republic that has ever been written"; it was also chosen in a survey of 2,000 historians and sociologists as one of the two most important books in the study of American religion.

Earlier Hatch had 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. He also served as president of the American Society of Church History in 1993.