Welcome from the Dean
Welcome to the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame! The College of Arts and Letters creates a lively environment in which students and faculty challenge their minds by studying the arts, humanities, and social sciences and open their hearts by reflecting on the deeper significance of their studies.
Conversations with Arts and Letters students reveal the three-fold value of a liberal arts education. Animated by enthusiasm for diverse subjects, students unabashedly claim that they “love learning Arabic” or are “fascinated by anthropology.” In such exclamations, we recognize that study of the arts, humanities, and social sciences is intrinsically good; exploring these fields encourages students to behold the world with wonder, to ask profound questions, and to value complexity.
At the same time, by challenging each other in a supportive learning environment, our students develop intellectual capacities that have tremendous practical relevance. Our liberal arts context fosters the ability to communicate clearly, to think critically, and to solve problems. It also creates the capacity to draw on a breadth of knowledge while patiently focusing on appropriate details. Through discussion classes, independent research projects, and international travel, our students develop skills that serve them well whether they enter graduate school or the job market.
Finally, and most importantly, the study of the liberal arts teaches Notre Dame students to combine their wonder and skill and to discern a higher purpose for their lives, a vocation. Their aim, they tell us, is to study material they enjoy and then to channel the skills they have learned into a life lived with a sense of meaning, a life lived to make a difference.
Through teaching, faculty members nurture that passion and eagerness and invite their students to find out not only how they should make a difference in the world, but also why they should want to do so. Arts and Letters faculty members are dedicated to exploring the question “Why?”. Using both time-tested methods and innovative technologies, faculty members love to engage students in conversation and help them discover the personal implications of their studies.
Excellent research enhances our ability to guide students in their development. In Arts and Letters, internationally recognized professors apply their knowledge to enrich the courses they teach. At the same time, they sustain their research by utilizing the abundance of support structures provided by the College.
In the wake of this peerless support, the College’s faculty has developed a distinctive profile in scholarship; during the past six years, the National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded the College faculty 20 fellowships, more than any other college or university in the country. Overall, the number of Arts and Letters faculty members who have received fellowships in the arts, humanities, and social sciences over the past five years places us among the top-six research universities in the country.
Of those research universities, Notre Dame stands apart as the sole institution affiliated with Catholicism. In the College of Arts and Letters, the University’s Catholic identity gives shape to our conversations, provides us with distinct strengths in scholarship, and grounds us in an intellectual tradition that allows us to reach upward—and out into the world.
In short, the College embodies the qualities that make the University of Notre Dame the world’s preeminent Catholic university. We are a liberal arts college—focused on cultivating understanding of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. We are a research university—supportive of faculty and student efforts to be original, creative scholars. And we are deeply Catholic—embracing diversity of thought and encouraging faculty and students to use their gifts to build a vibrant community, one endowed with a noble and transcendent purpose.
Welcome to the College of Arts and Letters—a distinctive and dynamic center of learning!
John T. McGreevy
I.A. O'Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters
