Robert Sedlack, associate professor of visual communication design in Notre Dame’s Department of Art, Art History, and Design, has been named the winner of the 2015 Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award. The Sheedy award presentation will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 6, in the McKenna Hall auditorium. It is open to all faculty and students.
Two faculty members from Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters—Laura Dassow Walls and Sophie White—have been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for 2015. The fellowships continue the University’s record success with the NEH. Since 1999, Arts and Letters faculty members have been awarded 53 total NEH grants—more than any other university in the country.
Is physical activity a factor in how friendships are formed? Do social circles influence a person’s health and fitness choices? A team of Notre Dame researchers hopes to explore those questions with the help of smartphone apps and wearable technology devices. Faculty members in the University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science and Applications (iCeNSA) have been awarded a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the relationship between social networks and health-related behaviors.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, assistant professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of English, has joined a prestigious group of writers that includes Jonathan Franzen, Alice McDermott, and David Foster Wallace. In March, Van der Vliet Oloomi was named a 2015 Whiting Award winner for “early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.” Other past winners of the Whiting Award, established in 1985, include Jeffrey Eugenides, Ben Marcus, Mona Simpson, and Suzan-Lori Parks.
Glynn Scholar Anna Kottkamp, an environmental science major from Wenatchee, Washington, has been named valedictorian of the 2015 University of Notre Dame graduating class and will present the valedictory address during the University Commencement Ceremony on Sunday, May 17, at Notre Dame Stadium. The Commencement invocation will be offered by Brendan Bell, a political science major from Havertown, Pennsylvania.
Lewis E. Nicholson, professor emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame, died Tuesday, April 28, at his home in South Bend. He was 93. A renowned scholar in medieval and Anglo-Saxon studies and a member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1958, Nicholson taught courses ranging from Beowulf, Chaucer, and Middle English metrical romance to classes on the Gothic language and Old Norse. For the last 18 years of his life, he directed the Hesburgh Library’s Medieval Library Initiative.
Sophie White, associate professor in the Department of American Studies, has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)—her second NEH award in five years—for her book project, Voices of the African Diaspora Within and Beyond the Atlantic World. As one of two winners from Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters for 2015, White continues the University’s record success in earning NEH fellowships. Arts and Letters faculty members have been awarded a total of 53 NEH fellowships since 1999—more than any other university in the country.
Laura Dassow Walls, the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English, has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to complete a biography of Henry David Thoreau. A renowned scholar of American transcendentalism, Walls began working on the book with the support of a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship during the 2010-11 academic year. She plans to publish the book to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Thoreau’s birth in 2017.
From Latvia to Chile, international experiences have become part of daily life for junior Abby Davis, a political science major in Notre Dame’s Glynn Family Honors Program. Davis has focused her studies on global migration and the politics of language—topics she hopes to explore further in a senior thesis project and eventually in graduate school.
The University of Notre Dame will host an exhibition of William Shakespeare’s First Folio next January. One of the world’s rarest and most treasured books, the First Folio is the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. It will be displayed in the Hesburgh Library at Notre Dame Jan. 4-29 during a nationwide traveling exhibition titled “First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare,” sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library in partnership with the Cincinnati Museum Center and the American Library Association and hosted by Shakespeare at Notre Dame.
Sarah Edmands Martin, a third-year graduate student in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, received the Walter Beardsley Award from the Snite Museum of Art for her thesis installation The Princess & The Beast. Charles Loving, director of the Snite Museum, presented the award during the opening reception for the 2015 Thesis Exhibition on April 10.
A group of Catholic scholars and Church leaders, including University of Notre Dame president Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., will gather at the University Monday, April 27 and Tuesday, April 28 to examine the problem of polarization among American Catholics and to propose ways it might be resisted and overcome. The conference, Polarization in the U.S. Catholic Church: Naming the Wounds, Beginning to Heal, opens at 4:30 p.m. Monday in Notre Dame’s McKenna Hall auditorium.
“I’m thrilled to be a part of this project and to be in Dublin. It’s an amazing opportunity,” said Katie Brennan, a sociology major in the College of Arts and Letters. During the summer of 2014, Brennan and three other University of Notre Dame undergraduates interned on the production of 1916: The Irish Rebellion, a three-part television documentary set to air on PBS, the BBC, and Irish broadcaster RTÉ in 2016.
A new book by Notre Dame professor Ebrahim Moosa offers an expansive introduction to madrasas, the most common kind of religious schools in the Islamic world. “I wrote this book for those who are curious and eager to know what exactly transpires in these institutions,” said Moosa, professor of Islamic Studies and author of What Is a Madrasa?, recently published by the University of North Carolina Press.“I see myself as a translator between the world inside the walls of the madrasa and those on the outside.
Douglas Duhaime, Ph.D. student in Notre Dame’s Department of English, is busy expanding the possibilities of humanities research in the digital realm. Very busy. While embarking upon a dissertation project that will use computational models to improve our understanding of early modern book culture, Duhaime has also taken a position with ProQuest, a global information content and technology company, to develop a text and data mining service for researchers.
The University of Notre Dame’s Division of Student Affairs recognized seven students at the annual Student Leadership Awards Banquet on Tuesday, March 31, six of whom majored in the College of Arts and Letters. Another award winner will be honored at the Graduate School Awards Ceremony on Friday, May 15. These annual awards recognize current students who have made exceptional contributions to the Notre Dame community.
“Women religious have tended to get pigeonholed in certain way, that either they were only praying the monastic hours or maybe just caring for their own, pastorally speaking, but they were doing much more than that,” said Katie Bugyis, a Ph.D. candidate in medieval studies through the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute.
The University of Notre Dame will play a major role in the international celebration of the centenary of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising, which was announced Tuesday, March 31 in Dublin by Taoiseach Enda Kenny. A documentary television series, 1916: The Irish Rebellion, produced by Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, will be broadcast worldwide during the centenary, which memorializes the events in Dublin on Easter Week a century ago, when an insurrection started a process that culminated in an independent Irish state and accelerated the disintegration of the British Empire.
“I actually knew that I wanted to do graduate work at Notre Dame when I was a sophomore in college,” said Amy Seymour, a Ph.D. candidate in Notre Dame’s graduate program in philosophy. Seymour chose Notre Dame, she said, because of the reputation of the University’s Center for Philosophy of Religion.
Chinese civil rights activist and former political prisoner Chen Guangcheng will give the University of Notre Dame’s 2015 Human Dignity Lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 7 in the McKenna Hall Auditorium. Chen’s lecture, “Interpreting Reform: Human Dignity and Human Rights in Contemporary China,” is sponsored by Notre Dame’s Institute for Church Life.
In fall 2015, the College of Arts and Letters will launch a new Collaborative Innovation program that focuses on the principles of design thinking—a powerful approach for solving real-world problems. “A dynamic, iterative, and deeply human process, design thinking prepares students for the type of collaborative, cross-disciplinary work they will encounter after graduation, no matter what career paths they pursue,” said Richard Gray, chair of the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, which will be home to the new program.
“How do we tell a more inclusive story that represents the broad and deep history of religion in the lands that became the United States?” said Thomas Tweed, the W. Harold and Martha Welch Endowed Chair in American Studies and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.
Stefanie Israel, a Ph.D. student in Notre Dame’s Department of Sociology and Ph.D. fellow in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, has been awarded a nine-month Fulbright Study-Research Grant. The prestigious funding, to begin in March 2016, will allow her to complete dissertation research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she is conducting a comparative ethnography of four “pacified” favelas.
Robert Sedlack, associate professor of visual communication design in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, is the recipient of the 2015 Rodney F. Ganey, Ph.D., Faculty Community-Based Research Award, given annually by the Notre Dame Center for Social Concerns. The award honors a Notre Dame faculty member whose research has made a contribution in collaboration with local community organizations.
An internship at the Vatican. A year abroad at the University of Oxford. A senior thesis on extremist recruiting in the U.S. and the Islamic state. Senior political science and economics major Alex Genord said that each of these academic feats has been made possible by her participation in the University of Notre Dame’s Glynn Family Honors Program.
The University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism will host the spring meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA) from Thursday, March 26 through Saturday, March 28 at the Notre Dame Conference Center in McKenna Hall.
Former Irish president Mary McAleese will speak on “The Irish Peace Process: Where to From Here,” at 7 p.m. Monday, March 16 in the University of Notre Dame’s McKenna Hall auditorium. McAleese joins the Notre Dame faculty this spring as Distinguished Martin and Carmel Visiting Scholar in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.
The University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute will host the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) annual conference Thursday-Saturday (March 12-14). Some 420 medieval scholars will attend the conference, at which the MAA will announce the winners of its new Olivia Remie Constable Award, established in memory of Olivia Remie Constable, Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute and professor of history at Notre Dame, who died last April.
The Notre Dame Initiative for Global Development (NDIGD) was recently awarded an $883,000 grant from the United States Department of Labor to implement an impact evaluation, determining the most effective approaches in reducing child labor. Eva Dziadula, assistant professional specialist in Notre Dame’s Department of Economics will be working closely with NDIGD throughout the evaluation.
From the University of Oxford to Michigan State University to University College Dublin, recent graduates of Notre Dame’s Ph.D. program in political science are landing choice positions, even in a competitive job market.