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Stuart Greene, associate dean for undergraduate studies in the College of Arts and Letters and associate professor in the Department of English, will be honored with the 2010 Rodney F. Ganey, Ph.D., Faculty Community-Based Research Award at an award ceremony set for April 7, 2010. The Center for Social Concerns award recognizes his latest project, No Parent Left Behind (NPLB), a parent-centered research initiative that springs both from Greene’s theoretical work in literacy learning and his many years of community-based research in South Bend’s schools.

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A high-profile roundtable in Washington, D.C., gave Kellogg Institute Faculty Fellow Daniel Brinks the opportunity to advise international financial institutions (IFIs) on how to improve their evaluations of the developing world’s legal systems. Organized by the Center on Law and Globalization, the “Measuring Law: How to Do It Right in Real World Circumstances” roundtable on March 23, 2010, brought together senior legal staff of IFIs such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and academic experts such as Brinks.

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When Becki Dorner started writing her senior thesis, she didn’t realize that she’d soon discover her professional passion. But that’s exactly what happened when Dorner, who graduated from Notre Dame in 2009 with bachelor’s degrees in English and the Arts and Letters Preprofessional Program, began working with John Duffy, associate professor of English and director of the University Writing Program, to study the language used to discuss autism.

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Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Notre Dame Professor of English, has received the 2010 Haskins Gold Medal from the Medieval Academy of America for her work, Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. The committee announced in presenting the award, “Kerby-Fulton’s magnum opus presents a fresh panorama of theology, literature, and history in the age of Chaucer with an originality that promises to have an impact across numerous disciplines within and beyond medieval studies for years to come.”

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Two faculty in the College of Arts and Letters’ Center for Philosophy of Religion have received more than $1.7 million in grant funding to continue their research into the problem of evil, a central issue for scholars who study the philosophy of religion. Michael Rea, professor of philosophy and the center’s director, and Samuel Newlands, assistant professor of philosophy and the center’s associate director, were recently awarded a grant of more than $339,000 from the John Templeton Foundation. The grant supplements an earlier $1.4 million grant the foundation awarded the two University of Notre Dame scholars.

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The University of Notre Dame’s Creative Writing Program will present “The Open Light: A Celebration of Notre Dame Poets,” a conference that will be held Monday through Wednesday, March 29 to 31, 2010, highlighting the accomplishments of the diverse group of poets who have studied or taught at Notre Dame. An accompanying anthology, The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008, will be published, featuring a foreword by Orlando Ricardo Menes, professor of poetry in the Creative Writing Program.

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Raymond Offenheiser Jr. travels through disaster zones about as routinely as most of us drive to work. From Africa to Afghanistan, New Orleans to most recently Haiti, Offenheiser has walked through cities and villages devastated by wars, famine and natural disasters. He has seen human suffering on a grand scale, and the heartening – and heartbreaking – efforts as people struggle to put the pieces of a life back together again. Offenheiser is the president of Oxfam America, the international relief and development agency that helps communities rebuild after a disaster. He will be speaking at the University of Notre Dame on Tuesday, March 30, at 6:30 p.m. in the Geddes Hall Andrews Auditorium.

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A gift from the estate of the late Philip L. Quinn, John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, will endow an annual fellowship in philosophy at the National Humanities Center (NHC). Quinn, a specialist in the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science, who joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1985, died Nov. 14, 2004. He had often spoken admiringly of the NHC, regarding it as crucial for the nurture of liberal arts scholarship, and for many years reviewed fellowship applications and served on the center’s selection committee.

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The sixth annual Erskine A. Peters Fellowship Symposium, titled “Reconstructing Michael Jackson’s Image: Explorations of Body, Spirit and Society,” will be held Thursday, March 25, 2010, at 7 p.m. in the Eck Visitors Center auditorium at the University of Notre Dame. Sponsored by the Department of Africana Studies, the symposium will feature the five 2009-10 Erskine Peters Fellows, who will discuss the image of the late musical artist Michael Jackson from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The symposium will be preceded by a reception at 6 p.m. in the Eck Center. Both events are free and open to the public.

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The University of Notre Dame’s Department of English and Creative Writing Program are hosting the third annual Women Writers Festival featuring authors Lorrie Moore (pictured in photo), Lolita Hernandez, and Frances Hwang. The two-day event, set for Tuesday and Wednesday, March 23 and 24, 2010, will be held in Notre Dame’s McKenna Hall and is free and open to the public.

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Two titans of the religious spectrum – atheist Christopher Hitchens and Catholic writer Dinesh D’Souza – will engage in a public debate at the University of Notre Dame. The debate, titled “Is Religion the Problem?”, will take place Wednesday, April 7, at 7:30 p.m. in the Leighton Concert Hall of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.

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Do teachers in urban, racially segregated schools experience more behavioral challenges in their classrooms and, as a result, modify their teaching strategies to cope with these challenges in ways that limit students’ engagement? That is the question addressed by Sean Kelly, assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Sociology, in his recently published article, “A Crisis of Authority in Predominantly Black Schools?” in Teachers College Record.

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Claire Reising, a Notre Dame junior majoring in French and English, has won a 2010 Prix Du Meilleur Essai award from Women In French (WIF) for best undergraduate essay written in French by a non-native speaker. In her paper, titled “‘Cette Condition de Sans-Famille’: Le Rejet du Rôle Maternel Chez les Jeunes Femmes,” she explores three books by Muslim and Muslim-born writers in which young female protagonists contest traditional female roles in their societies.

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Showcasing the creativity of contemporary Asian filmmaking, the University of Notre Dame’s annual Asian Film Festival will bring five films to the Browning Cinema of the DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts on Friday and Saturday, March 19-20, 2010.

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William Donaruma, a faculty member in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television and Theatre, has been honored in the 2010 Accolade Competition with an Award of Excellence: Feature Documentary for his film “Strong Bodies Fight.” Donaruma also won an Accolade Award of Merit: Direction in 2009 for his short film “Gotta Get Out!”

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Notre Dame’s Science of Generosity Initiative has awarded $1.4 million to four research projects that will study the origins, manifestations and consequences of generosity. The winning projects were chosen from among 325 proposals by scholars in 32 countries and numerous disciplines.

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Oxford University Press has just published Strategies of Peace, a collection of provocative essays that explore innovative models for building peace after genocide, civil war, and terrorism. The book features the writing of eight faculty members of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and seven other scholars of peace and conflict from around the country.

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The University’s Academic Council voted on February 25, 2010, to change the departmental structure supporting the College of Arts and Letters’ economics major, which is currently administered by faculty from two departments, Economics and Policy Studies and Economics and Econometrics.

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Michael Zuckert, Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science and former chair of Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science, will receive the Association for the Study of Free Institutions (ASFI) Award for Distinguished Scholarship on the Nature of a Free Society at the association’s annual conference in May 2010 at Princeton University.

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Notre Dame undergraduates interested in independent, interdisciplinary research have until March 16 to apply for up to $4,500 in grant funding made possible by a new cross-college collaboration. The new program, dubbed the College of Arts and Letters and College of Science Joint Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (AL/SCI-UROP), was announced in late February.

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Ryan Lash, a senior majoring in medieval studies and anthropology, has been awarded a Gates Scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge. He is one of only 29 American students who will become new Gates Scholars in 2010–2011. More than 800 U.S. students applied for this honor in the 2009 competition.

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