Berkeley's Dean of Social Sciences, Jon Gjerde, died suddenly October 26 at his home in Albany of an apparent heart attack. Gjerde was 55.

Gjerde became Dean in 2007 after a year as Interim Dean. He had previously served as Chair of the Department of History. Gjerde joined the Berkeley faculty in 1985 as Assistant Professor of History, and in 2007 became the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History.

Gjerde was a distinguished historian of immigration, widely respected for two prize-winning books, From Peasants to Farmers: The Migration from Belestrand, Norway to the Upper Middle West and The Minds of the West: The Ethnocultural Revolution of the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917 (1997). At the time of his death, he was nearing completion of a third major book, a study of Catholic-Protestant political and cultural interaction in the United States in the nineteenth century. He was also the editor of several other books and the author of several dozen monographic articles.

Gjerde was born in Waterloo, Iowa, on February 25, 1953. He completed his doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1982, and prior to that had been an undergraduate at the University of Northern Iowa. Always affectionate toward the small-town Methodist milieu in which he grew up, Gjerde was not captured by that milieu, but ranged far and wide in the domains of scholarship and culture. He was known throughout the world as a leading scholar in his field, yet would often say to friends pensively, according to his colleague, Professor David A. Hollinger, "In some ways, I've never really left the Middle West."

Dean Gjerde leaves his wife, Ruth Gjerde, who is a staff employee of Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and two daughters, Christine and Kari.

Memorial contributions may be directed to the Jon and Ruth Gjerde Graduate Student Endowment, a fund they established last year to benefit the History Department. (Checks should be made out to the UC Berkeley Foundation with a note directing it to the above named fund.)