Nathan O. Hatch is president of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, having been officially installed on October 20, 2005. Before coming to Wake Forest Hatch was a professor and later dean and provost at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to his career in academic administration he was a historian who was a leading scholar on issues related to the history of religion in the United States.
Born and raised in Columbia, South Carolina, Hatch graduated summa cum laude from Wheaton College (1968) in Illinois 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.
He served as associate dean of Notre Dame's College of Arts and Letters, its largest academic unit, from 1983 to 1988, and from 1988 to 1989 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 sixfold 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 to 1991. In 1999 Hatch was appointed the Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at Notre Dame.
In 1989 Hatch was appointed 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 University.