John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost and Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, has been elected to the Society of American Historians “in recognition of the narrative power and scholarly distinction” of his historical work. McGreevy was officially installed during the society’s annual meeting and awards ceremony on May 11 in New York City.
The society, based at Columbia University, was founded in 1939 to promote literary distinction in the writing of history and biography. Members are elected based on achievement in “the vivid and compelling presentation of history and biography in a variety of forms.” The society’s 450 current members include prominent academics, public historians, and professional writers working on topics in American history. They include Notre Dame history professor emeritus Mark Noll; award-winning biographers Robert Caro and Ron Chernow, and scholars such as Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a New Yorker staff writer.
“This is an unexpected honor,” said McGreevy, “and I am grateful to the members of the Society of American Historians for electing me. I’m also grateful to friends and colleagues at Notre Dame for supporting my scholarship over many years. The most compelling historical writing is at once rigorous and accessible, and I’ve tried to the best of my ability to reach that standard in my books and essays.”
McGreevy’s historical scholarship focuses on both American and global religion and politics. He is the author of four books that explore the people and the impact of the Catholic Church—the most recent of which, Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis, was published by W.W. Norton and released in September 2022. A French translation was published by Desclée de Brouwer in 2025. His other books include Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North (University of Chicago Press, 1996), Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (W.W. Norton, 2003), and American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton University Press, 2016).
He has received major fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Louisville Institute, and the Erasmus Institute, and he served on the Pulitzer Prize jury for History in 2010. McGreevy has published articles and reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, Journal of American History, New York Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, The New Republic, Chicago Tribune, and other venues. His essays have been translated into Italian, French, and Spanish.
McGreevy has served as Notre Dame’s provost since July 1, 2022, and was recently elected to a second five-year term beginning July 1, 2027. Previously, he was the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters from 2008 to 2018 and chair of the Department of History from 2002 to 2008.
He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Notre Dame and his master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Stanford University. McGreevy was the Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History and History and Literature at Harvard before joining Notre Dame’s faculty.
