At its meeting on 3 October 2019, the GSA Board unanimously approved the appointment of Dr. Margaret Eleanor Menninger, Associate Professor of History at Texas State University, as the GSA’s third Executive Director. She will assume that office on 1 January 2021; the current Executive Director, Prof. David E. Barclay, will remain in that function until the end of 2020.
Professor Menninger has served as NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities at Texas State, where she has taught in the Department of History since 2001. She received her A.B., M.A., and PhD degrees at Harvard University, where she studied with David Blackbourn. She is an accomplished chamber musician and is currently completing a manuscript on A Serious Matter and True Joy: Philanthropy, the Arts, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Leipzig. Among other things, she has published on the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
She brings a wealth of experience in the GSA to her new duties. She has served with distinction as Program Director and as chair of the Seminar Committee, and she is currently the GSA Secretary. We are confident that the GSA will thrive under Margaret Menninger’s leadership.