Fellowship Record

The ongoing scholarship of the College’s faculty has a strong record of attracting research funding from private foundations, corporations, and the federal government. Over the past decade, the number of faculty who have received major national fellowships in the arts, humanities, and social sciences places us among the top six universities in the nation. Our faculty has also had record success with the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Fellowships Awarded by the
National Endowment for the Humanities

1999–2013

  1. University of Notre Dame – 49
  2. University of Michigan – 36
  3. Harvard University – 28
  4. Princeton University – 23
  5. University of California, Berkeley – 21


Fellowships Awarded to Liberal Arts Faculty at
Top 25 National Research Universities

1999–2012

  1. Princeton University – 181
  2. Harvard University – 177
  3. University of Michigan – 169
  4. University of California, Berkeley – 161
  5. University of Chicago – 158
  6. Columbia University – 141
  7. University of Notre Dame – 138
  8. Northwestern University – 126
  9. University of Pennsylvania – 118
  10. Yale University – 102
  11. Duke University – 100
  12. Stanford University – 98
  13. Brown University – 96
  14. University of Virginia – 91
  15. Georgetown University – 84
  16. Cornell University – 80
  17. Emory University – 69
  18. Vanderbilt University – 69
  19. Washington University in St. Louis – 69
  20. Johns Hopkins University – 57
  21. Dartmouth University – 55
  22. Massachusetts Institute of Technology – 47
  23. Rice University – 40
  24. Carnegie Mellon University – 19
  25. California Institute of Technology – 13


Note: All fellowship numbers are taken from the fellowship lists provided by the funding agencies. Fellowship granting agencies are those used by the National Research Council in its rankings for the humanities. The Top 25 national research universities are from the U.S. News rankings (September 2003). The statistics include only faculty (rather than dissertation or pre-doctoral) fellowships. They also include only fellowships given to faculty in departments equivalent to those in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters (humanities, arts, and social sciences). Fellowships awarded to scientists and engineers were excluded for the purpose of comparing Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters to other universities. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford has not until recently made its fellowship lists public. Including those numbers could change the rankings slightly.


Research in the Humanities


Faculty News

  • Ken Garcia Receives Theology Book Award

    Ken Garcia, a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame, has been named a co-winner of the College Theology Society’s 2013 best book award for his work, Academic Freedom and the Telos of the Catholic University. Read More >

  • Historian Jon Coleman Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

    His two books thus far have explored American tales of wolves, bears, mountain men, and the truths behind myths. Now, Notre Dame History Professor Jon T. Coleman has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship to work on an environmental history of movement in America before the widespread use of automobiles and airplanes. Read More >

  • Video: English Professor Barry McCrea on Why Novels Matter

    “Why do we read novels and why do we write novels? We live inside of our heads, which is a place of dreams and fantasies and wishes and desires, but we live out our lives in this shared real world,” says Barry McCrea, the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies in Notre Dame’s Department of English. “Novels offer us not just a map of the human mind but a way to understand how the individual human mind interacts with the world outside.” Read More >

  • New Book Explores How Catholic Parishes Contribute to Polarization

    Same-sex marriage, abortion and other cultural conflicts centered on the family have intensified in recent years, particularly among American Catholics. These same conflicts also are widely believed to form the basis for much of the moral polarization in public politics among Americans in general. A new book by Mary Ellen Konieczny, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, examines how religion and family life are intertwined and how local parishes shape that intersection. Read More >