The University of Notre Dame’s Department of Economics has deepened its expertise in the areas of business cycles, healthcare, cultural assimilation, and the financial services sector with the recent hires of Ruediger Bachmann, Christopher Cronin, Felix Feng, and Eva Dziadula.
Associate Professor Lira Yoon has brought her expertise in social anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder to the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology, where she plans to establish an experimental psychopathology lab that uses multiple methods to better understand the interface between cognition and emotion.
University of Notre Dame Professor Alexander Martin has been awarded the 2013 Marc Raeff Book Prize for Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762 – 1855. The annual prize, awarded by the Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association, honors the best book in any discipline or language on the history and culture of Russia during that time period.
Rome. Bangladesh. An abandoned island off the Irish coast. These are just a few of the locations where William Donaruma ’89 has traveled as a filmmaker and teaching professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT). “Nothing beats experience and pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone,” Donaruma said.
Notre Dame Historian Catherine Cangany’s first book, Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt, posits that 18th-century Detroit—600 miles inland—could be seen as a coastal town. “Detroit was the seaport of the West, located in the heart of the Great Lakes,” said Cangany, assistant professor in the Department of History. “During the 18th century, it functioned in all the ways that a larger Atlantic seaport like Boston or Philadelphia did.”
A heart-wrenching film from three 2014 University of Notre Dame graduates took top honors in the short documentary category at this year’s Sunset Film Festival in Los Angeles. In The Suicide Disease, Katie Mattie, Vincent Moore, and William Neal tell the story of Frances Shavers, who worked at Notre Dame as chief-of-staff and special assistant to University President Father John Jenkins, C.S.C., before she was diagnosed with Trigeminal Neuralgia.
Meredith Whitnah took the first step along her journey to becoming a University of Notre Dame doctoral candidate in sociology when she was just 10 years old. “I borrowed a copy of Cry, the Beloved Country my sister was reading for a class,” Whitnah recalls.
Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science welcomed four new hires last fall and recognized the accomplishments of a faculty fellow as she entered her second year at the University. “In hiring Susan Collins, Sarah Daly, Tanisha Fazal, and Matt Hall, and by appointing Deondra Rose as a Moreau post-doctoral fellow, the Department of Political Science continues its tradition of bringing the very best scholar-teachers to Notre Dame’s intellectual community,” says Professor and Department Chair Michael Desch.
Two recent faculty hires in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters are generating excitement, even outside the University. David Gibson, associate professor of sociology, and Ann Mische, associate professor of sociology and peace studies, joined the faculty in the fall of 2013. Professor Rory McVeigh, chair of the Department of Sociology, says, “I can’t tell you how many people—outside of Notre Dame—have said something along the lines of, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize David Gibson was on your faculty,’ or ‘Wow! When did Ann Mische come to Notre Dame?’
Laura Miller ’08 grew up in a big, loving family, but her research at Notre Dame focuses on children who were less fortunate. A new faculty hire in the Department of Psychology and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Miller says her work integrates the quantitative and qualitative evaluations of children’s reactions to traumatic experiences, including exposure to violence.
Notre Dame’s Department of Economics has bolstered its strengths in development economics and healthcare policy with two new hires, who bring with them the invaluable experience of being advised by major figures in the field. Assistant Professor Kevin Donovan comes to Notre Dame from Arizona State University where his faculty adviser was Nobel laureate Edward Prescott, while Assistant Professor Ethan Lieber’s adviser at the University of Chicago was Steven Levitt, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal and author of Freakonomics.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Mike Amezcua heard stories about how his great-grandparents emigrated from Michoacán, Mexico to find work in Chicago during the 1920s. Such stories influenced Amezcua’s academic path, inspiring him to focus on how Mexicans helped shaped Chicago’s mid-20th century history. His journey will bring him to South Bend in fall 2014 as an assistant professor of history and faculty fellow in the College of Arts and Letters’ Institute for Latino Studies.
His two books thus far have explored American tales of wolves, bears, mountain men, and the truths behind myths. Now, Notre Dame History Professor Jon T. Coleman has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship to work on an environmental history of movement in America before the widespread use of automobiles and airplanes.
Anyone who has been through an ordeal with cancer knows firsthand that the disease, related stressors, and subsequent treatments take a toll not only on the body but also on the mind. Pascal Jean-Pierre—who this fall was named assistant professor of psychology and Walther Cancer Foundation Collegiate Chair in Psychology at the University of Notre Dame—has spent a good portion of his career advancing cancer-control research and working to improve psychosocial functioning and the quality of life for cancer patients and survivors.
The European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize—despite current economic woes and social unrest—for transforming most of Europe from “a continent of war to a continent of peace.” But political scientist Joshua Bandoch, who received his Ph.D. at Notre Dame this year and is now a post-doctoral fellow at Brown University, argues that the 27-member-nation European Union is trying to form too close of a union. “This is problematic because the diverse peoples of this union are more different than their leaders seem to want to acknowledge.”
As a documentary filmmaker, a faculty member in College of Arts and Letters’ Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT), and a producer for Fighting Irish Digital Media, Ted Mandell ’86 quite literally sheds light on the University of Notre Dame’s traditions of social justice and student athletics. What unites his approach to these roles, says Mandell, is a commitment to show the human side of every story—and help his students learn to do the same.
The Society for Disability Studies recently presented its Tyler Rigg Award to Essaka Joshua, a teaching professor in Notre Dame’s Department of English and the Joseph Morahan Director of the College Seminar program in the University’s College of Arts and Letters. Joshua received the accolade—given annually to the best paper in literature and literary analysis published in Disability Studies Quarterly—for “The Drifting Language of Architectural Accessibility in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris.”
With her graduate thesis project, University of Notre Dame alumna Charlotte Lux, M.F.A. ’11, set out to redesign a stressful diagnostic procedure women who might have breast cancer undergo in the hopes of making it less traumatic. The resulting design has earned Lux recognition in the 2012 Core77 Design Awards, where she was named student winner in the strategy and research category.
Orlando Ricardo Menes, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Creative Writing Program, recently was named winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for his manuscript, Fetish, which will be published by the University of Nebraska Press.
Notre Dame Professor Jon T. Coleman is interested in the truths that hide in lies. In his new book, Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, A Bear and the Rise of the American Nation, the historian uses a whopper of a story to explore not how the west was won but how its image was built.
On one of his six journeys to Antarctica as part of a team seeking to unravel mysteries of the universe, Michael Zernick ’83 brought along a University of Notre Dame flag. “I am proud to have graduated from Notre Dame,” he says, adding that “the University even has influence all the way to the South Pole.”
A movie produced and co-written by University of Notre Dame alumnus John Hibey ’05 was awarded the jury prize for short filmmaking at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The winning film, Fishing Without Nets, tells a tale of a poor, young Somali fisherman who ends up joining a group of pirates.
University of Notre Dame Assistant History Professor John Deak jokes that working in the largely neglected field of administrative and constitutional history he’s “the nerdy guy who stands in the corner at cocktail parties.” But his scholarship has recently earned serious attention in the form of a Richard Plaschka Fellowship from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research. The fellowship will allow him to spend most of the next year in Vienna, working on his first book, Power and the Politics of State in Imperial Austria, 1848-1918.