HSOC Professor Greg Nobles Retires

Posted April 19, 2016

A longtime member of the Ivan Allen College faculty will retire this year — Greg Nobles, professor in the School of History and Sociology.

Nobles came to Georgia Tech a third of a century ago, in 1983, as an assistant professor in our previous iteration as the College of Sciences and Liberal Studies (COSALS). He is now a professor of history, specializing in early American history and environmental history. Nobles has held a number of administrative positions — as associate dean of the College and chair of his school. He was the founding director of the Georgia Tech Honors Program, serving in that role from 2005 to 2014.

Nobles’ fourth and most recent book, Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding, co-authored with Alfred F. Young, was published by New York University Press. His current book in progress, Audubon’s ‘Great Work’: Creating Art, Science, and Self in the Early American Republic, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Nobles has held two Fulbright professorships, as a Senior Scholar in New Zealand in 1995 and as the John Adams Chair in American History in The Netherlands in 2002. He has also received numerous research grants, including three from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and residential fellowships at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, the Princeton University Library, and Newberry Library. In 2004 he was named to the Distinguished Lectureship Program by the Organization of American Historians and in 2005-08 served on the Advisory Council of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He now serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Early Republic.

Nobles’ immediate post-retirement work will be as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester Massachusetts, the leading research repository for North American history to 1876.

Nobles said that, “he realizes that, even with his departure, Georgia Tech will still hold classes and field a football team in the coming fall semester, and the life of the Institute will, as always, go on. What matters most, of course, the ongoing life of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, and he is happy to see it in such good hands.”