American historian
Mary Maples Dunn (April 6, 1931 – March 19, 2017[1]) was an American historian. She served as the eighth president of Smith College for ten years beginning in 1985. Dunn was also the director of the Schlesinger Library from 1995 to 2000. She was acting president of Radcliffe College when it merged with Harvard University, and she became the acting dean of the newly created Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study after the merger.[2]
Dunn later became a Radcliffe Institute Fellow[3] and served as co-executive officer of the American Philosophical Society from 2002 to 2007.[4]
Early life and education
Mary Maples was born on April 6, 1931, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, to Eva Moore Maples and Frederic Maples, who owned a clothing store. She was the second of four children and the only daughter.[1] While in Wisconsin, she attended a two-room school house.[1] Her father joined the Army during World War II where he remained as an officer after the war, retiring as a Colonel[1] As a result, the family was stationed in multiple bases around the United States and China.[5][6]
Career
Dunn's scholarship was focused primarily on William Penn, Pennsylvania, and the history of English-speaking colonies in the Mid-Atlantic region of what, following the American Revolutionary War, became the United States. She was a history professor at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where she taught an innovative interdisciplinary course in Latin American Studies in the mid-1970s.
The Mary Maples Dunn Prize, established in 2008 honors "the best article in early American women’s history by an untenured scholar published in William and Mary Quarterly that uses gender as a primary analytical category".[7]
Personal life
In 1960, she married Richard Slator Dunn, a scholar of American colonial history at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia.[2] They had two daughters and three grandchildren from their 56 years together.[2] Dunn remained a great traveler for the rest of her life. She and her husband were in Cairo during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 in Tahrir Square “It was surreal,” describes Dunn “We could see it all. There we were on this elegant terrace, comfortably viewing it all… That’s the only word for it—surreal.” “We had wandered into a war,” she says. “It was very clear that this was historic. We had CNN on all the time, and had access to Al Jazeera."[8] "And so we witnessed history in the making. It was an unusual experience, and an amazing opportunity. We are glad to be at home, but are feeling the greatest sympathy for the Egyptians, and maybe a little optimistic about their chances for a better regime and a reduction in the misery so many of them experience every day."[9]
