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For the second consecutive year, the University of Notre Dame has been ranked as the best in the world in theology, divinity, and religious studies by the influential QS World University Rankings. The No. 1 ranking is based on academic reputation, employer reputation, and research impact. With an overall score of 92.8, the Department of Theology placed ahead of Harvard University, the University of Oxford, Duke University, and Durham University.

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Joy Harjo, the 23rd poet laureate of the United States and the first Native American to hold the position, will speak at Notre Dame on Monday, Feb. 22 at 7 p.m. The online event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. An Evening with Joy Harjo is presented by Multicultural Student Programs and Services, the new Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience, and the Native American Student Association of Notre Dame. 

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La Donna Forsgren, an associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, has won the American Society for Theatre Research's Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize. The award, given annually to the best essay of theatre research in a scholarly English-language publication, honored Forsgren’s “The Wiz Redux; or Why Queer Black Feminist Spectatorship and Politically Engaged Popular Entertainment Continue to Matter,” which appeared in Theatre Survey. She was also appointed this month as associate editor of Theatre Survey, which will lead to her becoming editor of the journal in two years.

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The University of Notre Dame Children’s Choir will perform with award-winning jazz trumpeter, pianist and composer Arturo Sandoval at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, Calif., in support of his new album, “Arturo Sandoval’s Christmas at Notre Dame.” The Notre Dame Children’s Choir is joined by Notre Dame students Emily Swope, a soprano and masters student in voice, and senior music major Alexander Mansour, a pianist and arranger of seven songs on Sandoval’s album. The ensemble is led by Mark Doerries, associate director of Sacred Music at Notre Dame.

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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.

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A new book by a Notre Dame political science professor has sparked a fire in the public sphere, garnering significant discussion in major media outlets over his arguments about liberalism and modern society. In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen — the David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies — argues that liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions. 

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The legacy of Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga will continue on for years thanks to support from the John Templeton Foundation. He was named the 2017 Templeton Prize Laureate this spring — joining the ranks of previous winners Mother Teresa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Charles Taylor, Jean Vanier, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama — and his work will now be chronicled in a series of 10 short, animated videos, which will present many of his central arguments in a visually captivating style designed to appeal to a wide audience. With funding from the Templeton Foundation, the project will be led by two Notre Dame philosophy professors.

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Dianne Pinderhughes has been honored by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists with the creation of the Dianne M. Pinderhughes Mentorship Legacy Award. The award provides funding for undergraduate students to attend the NCOBPS annual meeting. Created by her former students, it honors Pinderhughes’ positive influence on their careers and her longstanding commitment to mentoring.

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Patrick Griffin, the Madden-Hennebry Professor of History and chair of Notre Dame’s Department of History, has been elected to the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture. Founded in 1943 at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, the Institute supports research on the history and cultures of North America from 1450 to 1820.

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The University of Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art presents Raising Children for Strangers, featuring the latest work of the Brooklyn-based, Taiwanese-American artist Fay Ku. The special exhibition is a collaboration between the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Liu Institute of Asia and Asian Studies, and the Snite Museum. The seven pieces featured in the exhibit are hybrid works of art that, to use the artist’s own words, “adopt visual tropes from both Western art and found images from social media to create tableaux that are open-ended narratives.”

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Barry McCrea, the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies and a professor of English, Irish language and literature, and Romance languages and literatures, has been awarded the René Wellek Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association for the best book in the past year in comparative literature. McCrea’s Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe explores how the decline of rural languages and dialects in 20th-century Europe shaped ideas about language and literature and exerted a powerful influence on literary modernism. The prize is generally considered to be the most prestigious award in the field of literary studies.

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Entries are now being accepted for the 7th annual Undergraduate Library Research Award competition sponsored by the Hesburgh Libraries and the Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement. Established in 2010 to promote critical thinking, intellectual discovery, and the advancement of lifelong learning, the ULRA recognizes undergraduate students who demonstrate excellent research skills by their broad use of library expertise, resources, collections, and services in their scholarly and creative projects. Last year’s winners included three students from the College of Arts and Letters. A total of $3,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to six 2016 winners.

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Alexander Martin, a Notre Dame professor of history, has won the Urban History Association’s Best Book Award for a work of non-North American urban history published in 2013-14. His book, Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762–1855 also won the 2013 Marc Raeff Book Prize awarded by the Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association to the best book in any discipline or language on the history and culture of Russia during that time period.

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Political Science Professor Michael Desch has been appointed director of the Notre Dame International Security Center. “This is both a tremendous honor and a daunting challenge,” Desch said. “My colleagues and I have made much progress since 2008 in building NDISC into a leading center for international security studies. But our challenge now is to take it to the next level in terms of both the scope of our programming as well as its impact on campus and in the academic and policy communities more broadly.”

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The Notre Dame International Security Center has received a five-year, $3.5 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation to further develop and expand its role as a forum for broader scholarship on U.S. foreign policy. The grant builds on the significant and wide-ranging support the center has received since it was founded seven years ago—including two grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to research how American scholars can contribute to the formation of U.S. national security policy.

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Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, assistant professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of English, has been named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35. The honor is bestowed to top young fiction writers selected by past National Book Award winners and finalists. Van der Vliet Oloomi, the author of Fra Keeler, was chosen for the list by novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who was a 5 Under 35 honoree after publishing The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears in 2007.

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What’s going on in your head while you sleep? The research of Jessica Payne, associate professor and Nancy O’Neill Collegiate Chair in Psychology, shows that the non-waking hours are incredibly valuable for your day-to-day life, especially for helping to commit information to memory and for problem solving. If you ever thought sleep was just downtime between one task and the next, think again.

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There are 60 million displaced people in the world, and every day, an estimated 40,000 people flee their homes in search of safety elsewhere. For many, a temporary stop in a refugee camp becomes a lifetime of dependency and desolation. Notre Dame anthropology professor Rahul Oka believes there is a better way to provide aid to these residents. For several years, with colleagues in the Department of Anthropology, the Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science and Applications and the Ford Family Program, he has studied the evolution of trade and commerce, focusing on the formal and informal economies that develop within these camps.

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The University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), in close collaboration with the Creative Writing Program, will present a conference, “Angels of the Americlypse,” on October 28 and 29, 2015, featuring Latino/a poetry readings, literary translation, and roundtable discussions. The event—held in conjunction with Letras Latinas, the ILS literary initiative—will include readings by acclaimed poets Rosa Alcalá, Carmen Giménez Smith, Roberto Tejada, and Rodrigo Toscano.

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“Rachel Rivers Parroquín, director of Spanish community-based learning and an assistant professional specialist in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures”, has been named 2015 Indiana Teacher of the Year, University Category, by the Indiana Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She will now be considered along with teachers of the year in other languages for the Indiana Foreign Language Teachers Association Teacher of the Year 2015, Central States Teacher of the Year 2017, and American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages National Teacher of the Year 2018.

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An Italian-born, German-speaking scholar of ancient philosophy will spend the 2015-16 academic year at the University of Notre Dame, supported by the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study and Workshop on Ancient Philosophy teamed up to help secure the post-doctoral fellowship for Diego De Brasi, an assistant professor of classical philology at the University of Marburg, Germany.

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Two faculty members from Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters have won fellowships this year from the American Council of Learned Societies. John P. Welle, a professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and concurrent professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, was awarded the fellowship to complete his book, The Poet and the Diva: Print Media from the Golden Age of Italian Silent Film. Eileen Hunt Botting an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, received the award to support her book project, Frankenstein and the Question of Human Development.

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The 15th annual Saturday Scholar Series promises an intriguing lineup of lectures by leading faculty members on each home football game weekend this fall.

Sponsored by the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, the lectures address a variety of fascinating issues and offer an opportunity to meet and interact with some of the University’s most engaging faculty.…

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New York Judge Alex M. Calabrese ’75, a psychology major, is the winner of the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Award and Chris Stevens ’74, who studied economics, will receive the Harvey G. Foster Award. The honors of two of the Notre Dame Alumni Association’s three most prestigious awards.

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With her Notre Dame sociology degree in hand, Sarah Hart ’15 is headed for the business world. When she starts work as a project manager at Epic, a software development company in the health care industry, her major has her set to succeed in a corporate environment. “It’s definitely given me a wide range of skills that can be applied to almost anything,” Hart said.

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Patrick Salemme ’14 went to Mexico to make an impact on global health. Once he got there, his experience in the College of Arts and Letters helped him determine how he could do the most good. The anthropology and Arts and Letters pre-health major deferred his entry into medical school in order to spend a year in Chiapas, Mexico—a mountainous, coffee-farming region where more than half the residents live below the poverty line.

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Joyelle McSweeney is an associate professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Notre Dame. She is the author of six books of poetry and prose, as well as a critical book, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, which was published in December 2014.

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Beth Munnich received her Ph.D. in economics from Notre Dame in 2013. Now an assistant professor at the University of Louisville, Munnich’s research focuses on health economics and economics of the family. This winter, she shared her thoughts on her experience at Notre Dame.

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The American Sociological Association has appointed three sociologists from the University of Notre Dame to serve as the next editors of the American Sociological Review, the association’s flagship journal. Associate Professor Omar Lizardo, Professor Rory McVeigh, and Professor Sarah Mustillo will begin their three-year term in January 2016.

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A degree from a reputable community college has the potential to lift people out of poverty, but 60 percent of community college students drop out before they graduate. The research of economists Jim Sullivan and William Evans at Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities found that most of these students drop out as a result of non-academic obstacles. Sullivan and Evans are attempting to increase retention rates through the program Stay the Course.

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