Notre Dame senior Alisa Rantanen has been named the Midwest District Merit Award winner, ranking her one of the top five graduating industrial design students in the nation. Her work will be showcased at the Industrial Designers Society of America’s (IDSA) international conference in Chicago August 21-24.
Notre Dame economist Nelson Mark has been appointed acting director of the University’s Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. The appointment is effective immediately and runs through July 1, 2014. “As acting director, I am eager to help develop research and academic programming that drive collaborative scholarship on the many interdisciplinary issues that confront Asia,” says Mark, the Alfred C. DeCrane Jr. Professor of International Economics.
The Department of Political Science at Notre Dame welcomes four prominent scholars to its faculty this year, including professors Gary Goertz and Patrick Regan, both specialists in international relations, and associate professors Patrick Deneen in constitutional studies and Guillermo Trejo in comparative politics.
Derek A. Webb, who received his Ph.D. from Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science in 2008, was recently honored at the U.S. Supreme Court for his paper titled “The Original Meaning of Civility: Democratic Deliberation at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention.” Webb’s essay won the American Inn of Court’s prestigious 2012 Warren E. Burger Prize, named for the late Chief Justice and the founder and first president of the Supreme Court Historical Society.
Paris, the legendary City of Lights, is the newest destination for University of Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters students who want to study abroad. “We are delighted to offer this new opportunity beginning in 2013-14,” says Julia Douthwaite, a professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. “The new exchange program at the Université Paris Diderot will expand existing offerings by allowing advanced students in the humanities to enroll directly in courses with French students at one of the youngest and most dynamic universities in Paris.”
Networking with industry insiders, watching highly anticipated films, walking the red carpet, and seeing stars was all part of the job for a group of University of Notre Dame students who jetted off to the 2012 Cannes International Film Festival this summer. Working with Assistant Professor Aaron Magnan-Park, the students from the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) were granted the exclusive right to make a documentary about the internship program at the festival’s American Pavilion—an opportunity that provided a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the premier event in international film.
Novelist Mo Yan today became the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. If you have ever read any of his work in English, you probably have Howard Goldblatt to thank. Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Red Sorghum, The Republic of Wine, The Garlic Ballads, Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh, and Selected Stories by Mo Yan are among the author’s works translated by Goldblatt, a professor of Chinese in Notre Dame’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures from 2002-2011.
Eileen Hunt Botting, an associate professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science, and one of her former Ph.D. students, Sarah L. Houser, recently won the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Edition Award for their book Hannah Mather Crocker’s Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston. The triennial prize recognizes excellence in the recovery of American women writers.
University of Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory has been awarded the inaugural Aldersgate Prize for Christian Scholarship for his latest book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Presented by Indiana Wesleyan University’s John Wesley Honors College (JWHC), the prize recognizes a published book’s ability to reflect the highest ideals of Christian scholarship.
When Christine Becker signed up for Twitter in September 2009, the associate professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre wasn’t sure what to expect. What she found was a new way to connect with people in both academia and the television industry, a new source of research and teaching materials, and a vehicle for staying on the leading edge of her scholarly field.
Notre Dame’s Ryan Geraghty ’12 has been named one of the top five graduating industrial design students in the nation, and his work will be featured at the Industrial Designers Society of America’s (IDSA) International conference in Boston August 15-18. Geraghty earned this opportunity by winning first place at the IDSA’s Midwest District competition in April. “For students, this is the highest honor they can receive within our profession and within our professional society,” says Assistant Professor Ann-Marie Conrado, “so that’s something that goes down in the record books.” Another record for the books: Geraghty was the fifth Notre Dame student in six years to take the title.
Adam Asher Duker, a graduate student in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of History, has been awarded a 2012 Fulbright to Switzerland, along with a Bourse de la Confédération Suisse.
Notre Dame assistant professor Monika Nalepa has won the American Political Science Association’s 2012 Leon D. Epstein prize for Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge University Press). This is the second win in two years for Nalepa. Skeletons in the Closet also won the 2011 Best Book Award from the APSA’s Comparative Democratization section.
University of Notre Dame economist Joseph Kaboski has been awarded the 2012 Frisch Medal for a paper evaluating the impact of microfinance, widely used as a tool to fight poverty in developing countries. First awarded in 1978, the Econometric Society presents the Frisch Medal biennially for the best empirical or theoretical applied paper published in Econometrica within the previous five years. The Frisch medal is not only one of the top three prizes in the field of economics but also the most prestigious “best article” award in the profession, says Rich Jensen, Gilbert F. Schaefer Professor of Economics at Notre Dame and chair of the Department of Economics.
Anne García-Romero, an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, has been accepted to the prestigious Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference this summer. One of just eight playwrights selected out of nearly 1,000 applicants, García-Romero will spend the month of July at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut, working with acclaimed theatre professionals to workshop her play Provenance. Also among the honorees is Notre Dame English alumna Theresa Rebeck ’80, an award-winning playwright and creator of the television show Smash.
Carly Anderson, a recent graduate of University of Notre Dame, has been named one of 15 winners of the 2012 Gilder Lehrman History Scholar Award. The new award recognizes outstanding graduating college seniors from across the country who have demonstrated academic and extracurricular excellence in American history or American studies.
Ariel Clark-Semyck, a rising sophomore English major at the University of Notre Dame, will spend three weeks at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre this June as part of the Fulbright Summer Institute program. She is one of three U.S. students invited to attend the American Institute for Foreign Study (AIFS) Summer Institute at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre—a demanding academic and cultural immersion program that focuses on acting and the study of Shakespearean texts, including workshops on combat play, set design, movement, and dance.
Notre Dame Assistant Professor Michael (Tzvi) Novick has been appointed Abrams College Chair of Jewish Thought and Culture in the College of Arts and Letters’ Department of Theology. Novick holds both a Ph.D. and a J.D. from Yale University. His scholarship ranges across a broad spectrum of themes and genres in late antiquity: from rabbinic law and ethics, to liturgical poetry, to narratological analysis of biblical and Second Temple Judaism texts.
College of Arts and Letters students made a strong showing at Notre Dame’s 5th annual Undergraduate Scholars Conference, which showcased more than 250 research, scholarship, and creative projects from across the University. At the May 4, 2012, event, senior art history honors student Caroline Maloney won first prize in the Undergraduate Library Research Awards sponsored by Hesburgh Libraries and the Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement.
José E. Limón, one of the country’s foremost scholars of Latino literature, has been tapped to lead the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies (ILS). As the new director of ILS, he will hold the Julian Samora Chair in Latino Studies. Timothy Matovina, a leading expert on Latino Catholicism, will serve as executive director of the institute, which is housed in the College of Arts and Letters. Both appointments take effect July 1, 2012. Established in 1999, the Institute for Latino Studies supports a variety of interdisciplinary initiatives to foster understanding of the U.S. Latino experience.
Notre Dame theologian Jean Porter has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies. Porter, the Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Theological Ethics, specializes in Christian ethics and the history and interpretation of the natural law tradition in Catholic ethical reflection, particularly the moral theology of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Rob Cain ’91 is the chief information officer, enabling functions, for The Coca-Cola Company. During a recent visit to campus, the English major shared his thoughts on the value of a liberal arts education from Notre Dame—both as an alumnus and a hiring manager.
Jim Corgel ’73 is currently general manager of independent software vendor and developer relations at IBM Corporation, where he has worked for 36 years. During a recent visit to campus, the American Studies major, who later also received an MBA from the University, shared his thoughts on the value of a liberal arts education from Notre Dame
Ying “Alison” Cheng, an assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology, has been named the 2012 winner of the Jason Millman Promising Scholar Award. Given by the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), the award honors outstanding scholars “whose research has the potential to make a major contribution to the applied measurement field.”
Former Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters Dean Mark Roche has been named winner of the 2012 Frederic W. Ness Book Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The Ness award is given annually to the book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education. Roche’s winning book, Why Choose the Liberal Arts? (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), “outlines the benefits of a liberal education for all students striving for success in today’s tough economy,” says Pomona College President David W. Oxtoby, the Ness Book Award committee chair.
University of Notre Dame Professor Kent Emery, Jr., and his team have been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to produce the first critical edition of a key work by medieval theologian and philosopher John Duns Scotus. The 3-year, $300,000 grant was one of the largest awarded by the NEH this year, according to Emery, a professor in the College of Arts and Letters’ Program of Liberal Studies (PLS) and the Medieval Institute.
Robert Sedlack, an associate professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Art, Art History and Design, recently won two American Graphic Design Awards for University-related projects. Graphic Design USA magazine honored Sedlack ’89 for his work on the Parallel Currents exhibition catalogue for the University’s Snite Museum of Art and for Words for Painting, an artist’s monograph showcasing the work of Notre Dame Assistant Professor Jason Lahr.
As a student in Notre Dame’s Department of History, Colin Rich ’11 didn’t memorize the names and dates of significant World War I battles, and he can’t recite a list of every U.S. president and vice president. What he did learn as a history and economics major in the College of Arts and Letters was far more valuable: the ability to uncover how and why things happen, to speak persuasively, to write concisely, and to synthesize an array of sources in into a cogent argument.
College of Arts and Letters students taking on senior thesis projects can accelerate the research and writing process during fall break at Hesburgh Libraries’ second annual Senior Thesis Camp.
It’s a timeless project—and a priceless opportunity: Advanced students at the University of Notre Dame are currently working with some of Italy’s top linguistics experts to assemble the most complete historical dictionary of the Italian language prior to 1375. Notre Dame is currently the only university outside of Italy invited to contribute research to the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO) project, an initiative of the prestigious Accademia della crusca’s Opera del vocabolario italiano (OVI) branch.