Heather Reynolds, a nonprofit leader with extensive expertise in poverty alleviation, will join the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities at Notre Dame as its inaugural managing director in January. Reynolds has served as president and CEO at Catholic Charities Fort Worth for the past 14 years.
Ying Alison Cheng, associate professor of psychology and fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame, will lead a $1.4 million project funded by the Institute of Education Sciences to develop the intelligent diagnostic assessment program (i-DAP) for high school statistics education.
Joseph Antenucci Becherer, the founding director and curator of the sculpture program at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has been appointed the new director of the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame. He will lead a staff of 16 responsible for exhibition development and educational programs that serve Notre Dame students and faculty as well as thousands of primary and secondary school students. He also will play a major role in helping design the University’s new Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at Notre Dame, scheduled to open in 2021.
Brad Gregory, director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and Dorothy G. Griffin Professor of Early Modern European History, received a 2018 Expanded Reason Awards honorable mention for his book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.
“African-American cultural experience is one that can't be bound by national boundaries,” said Mark A. Sanders, a professor of English and Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame. Sanders researches early 20th-century American and African American literature and culture. He has worked extensively on the Harlem Renaissance, writing one book and co-editing another on the poet Sterling Brown. He is now working to bring together scholars to translate work by African-descended writers from across the Americas.
Laura Dassow Walls, the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, has won the 2018 Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa for her biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life. The prize, which recognizes outstanding books of literary scholarship, will be presented at a reception in Washington, D.C., in December.
In a first-of-its-kind study, Notre Dame anthropologist Lee Gettler and psychologist Patty Kuo focused on how dads’ biology around the birth of their children relates to their parenting down the road. Dads whose cortisol levels were elevated while they held their newborns on the day of their birth – either skin to skin or clothed – were more likely to be involved with indirect care and play with their infants in the first months of their lives.
It was a New Year’s Eve celebration that Mary McGraw '17 will never forget. McGraw was ringing in the new year with eight Benedictine nuns at Kylemore Abbey in Galway, Ireland. This intimate moment isn’t something that most study abroad students get to experience while in Ireland. In fact, most people will never know what it’s like to see these nuns behind closed doors. It took several months in Kylemore for McGraw to develop trust with the nuns and, ultimately, a relationship that allowed her to gain a unique perspective into their everyday lives. A studio art major with a photography concentration, McGraw was able to pull back the curtains and capture even more intimate moments through her camera lens — a project that led to her senior thesis.
Kate Marshall is associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests include media theory, narrative, and the philosophy of science. "I spend a lot of time working on problems in contemporary fiction and how they relate not only to the long history of the novel and other forms of literary representation but also the way that they relate to other ways of thinking in the contemporary world," she says."
Kristin Valentino is dedicated to understanding how adversity in early childhood — such as chronic poverty or maltreatment — can affect children’s mental and physical health later in life. And she wants to know how psychologists can best intervene and improve outcomes for those children. The William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Associate Professor of Psychology has been awarded a $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue exploring these issues in her latest project, “Pathways Linking Early Adversity and Support to Behavior and Physical Health.”
Donald C. Sniegowski, professor emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame, died Tuesday (Sept. 18) at the age of 83.
Joseph Parent, an associate professor of political science and associate director of the Notre Dame International Security Center, recently studied how states respond to shifts in power, questioning the conventional wisdom that great powers become more aggressive when they are falling. “In fact, decline is one of the biggest causes of peace,” he said. “It turns out that states were very aware of their declining power and they knew that if they started something, it would end badly for them.”
Now a senior program office for IREX in Washington, D.C., Micah Johnston '06 spent his first year after graduation volunteering for the Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly in Chicago. He spent his days visiting the homes of elderly individuals who did not regularly see friends or family. “Spending a year in service helps other people, but it can also be a master class in learning about the world, learning about other people, incorporating that into the education you get at Notre Dame,” he said.
An internationally acclaimed jazz and classical musician and composer, Arturo Sandoval has received 10 Grammy Awards, six Billboard Awards and an Emmy Award and is a 2013 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, this nation’s highest civilian honor. Sandoval will headline a festive Christmas in September event featuring the Notre Dame Children's Choir, Notre Dame Symphonic Winds, and the Notre Dame Jazz Ensemble. His album Arturo Sandoval's Christmas at Notre Dame, recorded last year in the Leighton Concert Hall, will be released Sept. 28.
In this Q&A, Leslie Lockett, an associate professor of English and director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The Ohio State University, discusses early medieval concepts of the mind, what initially hooked her on the Middle Ages, and her advice for graduate students who would like to follow her career track.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz is among the academics chosen to participate in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Forum on Free Speech in Higher Education on Monday (Sept. 17) in Washington, D.C.
Christiane Baumeister is Robert and Irene Bozzone Associate Professor of Economics at Notre Dame. Her research interests include empirical macroeconomics, energy economics, applied time series econometrics, and monetary economics.
According to new research led by Notre Dame Associate Professor Guillermo Trejo, nations that adopt transitional justice measures, such as truth commissions and judicial prosecutions for past human rights violations, experience lower homicide rates and lower levels of criminal violence.
Ernesto Verdeja, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, will receive the 2018 Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award. The highest teaching honor in the College of Arts and Letters, the Sheedy Award was created in 1970 to honor the Rev. Charles E. Sheedy, C.S.C., who served as dean of Arts and Letters from 1951 to 1969. Verdeja will receive the award at a reception in his honor in May 2019.
The Department of Theology has launched a new area of concentration within its Master of Theological Studies program — World Religions World Church. Applications for the two-year, full-time program will be due on January 15, 2019, for admission in August 2019. The area of WRWC offers students the opportunity to study both global religions and the global Church while also receiving exposure to other areas of Christian theology. In their WRWC coursework, students will have the freedom to focus on a particular non-Christian tradition or cultural context of the Church and to develop their abilities in primary and research languages.