Mary Maples Dunn

Mary Dunn died on March 19, 2017. Dunn was a historian and scholar who served from 1985 to 1995 as Smith College’s eighth president. She was regarded as a champion for women and for women’s history. After retiring from Smith in 1995, Dunn served for five years as director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and led Radcliffe College during its 1999 integration with Harvard and the creation of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. From 2002 until her retirement in 2007, she served as coexecutive officer of the American Philosophical Society with her husband, Richard. She was the recipient of honorary degrees from Smith, Amherst College, Brown University, Lafayette College, Marietta College, Haverford College, Transylvania University, and the University of Pennsylvania. In 2008, the William and Mary Quarterly established the Mary Maples Dunn Prize to honor “the best article in early American women’s history by an untenured scholar” published in that journal “that uses gender as a primary analytical category.”