Latest News

Notre Dame anthropologist Alex E. Chávez published a new book, Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño through Duke University Press this week. Chávez came to his research not only as a trained scholar, but also as a performer, trained in classical and jazz. At an early age, he was also exposed to huapango arribeño. This understudied folk music originates in Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi, and Queretaro, in the heart of Mexico.

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The John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame has released its sixth annual list of emerging ethical dilemmas and policy issues in science and technology. The annual list is designed to get people thinking about the ethics of potentially controversial technology, but the 2018 list shows that many of these issues are already here.  

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The first social psychology course that Jessica Collett took as an undergraduate left her wanting more. While the topic was fascinating, the examples in the textbook were dated and didn’t resonate with her or her fellow students. Now an associate professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Sociology, Collett has won the 2017 Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor in the College of Arts and Letters. And she’s now the co-author of that same textbook from her first sociology class.

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Debra Javeline, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and affiliated faculty member of the Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative, applies her knowledge to the “responses of ordinary people to hardship.” She spoke about her perspective in this Q&A session with ND-ECI.

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In Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (Princeton University Press, 2017), author A. James McAdams seeks to understand how such a significant institution could be so different from country to country and still flourish. To find the answer, McAdams traveled to every location with a history of communism to research this book, including China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union.

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More than 750 scholars and guests are gathering at the University of Notre Dame for the Center for Ethics and Culture’s 18th annual interdisciplinary fall conference, “Through Every Human Heart,” November 9–11. The conference features 112 presentations that consider the perennial problem of good and evil in our world.

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Stefanie Israel de Souza, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and a dissertation year fellow in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, has been awarded a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. She is one of just 10 students from across the country to win the prestigious award, which supports Ph.D. candidates in their final year of dissertation completion.

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Working to advance the mission of the Church in service of development, peace, and disarmament, attendees will address such topics as the July 2017 United Nations treaty banning nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons and the environment, and the role of Church and civil society in promoting disarmament. The speakers and panelists include Nobel Prize winners, senior diplomats, and leaders from the United Nations and NATO, as well as academic experts and religious leaders.

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University of Notre Dame alumnus John A. “Jack” Kelly and his wife, Gail E. Weiss, have made a $1 million gift to his alma mater to support initiatives within the University’s Notre Dame International Security Center (NDISC) and the Office of the President. Founded in 2008 and recently expanded with the addition of three new faculty members, the International Security Center is under the direction of Michael Desch, professor of political science. NDISC examines pressing international security issues facing the nation and world and conducts research that contributes to dialogue on global policy. The center supports faculty and student research projects, an endowed speaker series, an undergraduate fellows program and a seminar series featuring scholars and experts on national security.

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The Medieval Institute's new series of alumni spotlight interviews kicks off with alumna Nicole Eddy, who received her Ph.D. in 2012. Eddy has recently been hired as the new managing editor for the Medieval Library series at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

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Patrick Griffin, the Madden-Hennebry Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, has been appointed director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, effective Jan. 1, 2018. Griffin, who joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2008, explores the intersection of colonial American and early modern Irish and British history, focusing on Atlantic-wide themes and dynamics.

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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 a prestigious fellowship from the Princeton University Humanities Council. McCrea will spend the spring 2018 semester at Princeton as a visiting professor in the Humanities Council and the Faber Fellow in Comparative Literature. While there, he will continue work on his upcoming novel, tentatively titled Thorn Island, and will teach an advanced literature course to a mix of undergraduate and graduate students.

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Lessons from Breaking Bad: Why being an avid fan of the groundbreaking series inspired him to study negative representations of Latinos in popular culture.

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Paloma Garcia-Lopez — an educator, nonprofit leader, and manager with more than 15 years of experience — has been appointed associate director of the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame. In her new role, Garcia-Lopez will manage and oversee all of the activities and staff of the institute. Garcia-Lopez will focus on enhancing annual programming, special events, communications, fundraising and budgeting. She will be a central figure in the development of a strategic plan to support scholarly initiatives in Latino studies as a key component of Notre Dame’s academic mission.

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Michelle Karnes believes imagination is the key to understanding medieval meditations about the life of Christ. When readers picture themselves holding Jesus as a baby or feeding him, it evokes powerful emotions, she said. “There are good cognitive reasons why imagining yourself participating in Christ’s life helps you engage with the narrative,” she said. “It causes you to invest yourself in a more profound way.” Karnes joins the faculty in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters this fall as an associate professor of English, after eight years at Stanford University.

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In the past two years, 35 history majors in Paul Ocobock’s honors seminar have received more than $125,000 in funding to do original research around the world. And every student in his course who applied for funding received it — using the grants to explore archives in France, Ireland, Uganda, China, and South Korea, among other places. But to Ocobock, there is something even more important than his students’ 100 percent success rate in securing funding — the sense of community they develop as they plan their projects together, travel the globe to conduct research, then return to his classroom to begin work on their senior theses.

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This year’s report estimates poverty in the U.S. to be 12.7 percent for 2016, which is very close to the rate in 1980, suggesting little progress or change in the fight against poverty. However, the official poverty measure is flawed, according to James Sullivan, Rev. Thomas J. McDonagh, C.S.C., Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, and Bruce Meyer, McCormick Foundation Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

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In his opening remarks for “Land O’Lakes and Its Legacy,” on September 5, Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., suggested that among the essential activities of a university is to engage in discussion and debate about what its proper activities are. The examination included a lecture and panel discussion with four other Catholic university presidents in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the drafting and signing of the Land O’Lakes Statement. Arts and Letters Dean John T. McGreevy opened the event with a talk on the historical contexts of Land O’Lakes. He pointed to the impact of Vatican II, shifts in university and faculty governance, and a more global Church as essential backdrops for understanding the intentions of Land O’Lakes.

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“I'm interested in literature as product of a community and the way in which they decide what to include, what not to include, what is good, what is bad, how they choose to engage with censorship or not engage with censorship,” said Michel Hockx, professor of Chinese literature and culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in the College of Arts and Letters and director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. Hockx has published works both in English and in Chinese on early 20th-century Chinese print culture as well as contemporary Internet culture in China.

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In summer 2016, Notre Dame senior Andrew Grose studied abroad in Spain — taking a headfirst dive into a language and culture he loved and had studied for years. The experience confirmed for him that whatever path he takes after graduation, Spanish will be a part of it. Grose, a Spanish and preprofessional studies major, is planning a career in medicine and knows his language skills will be a valuable asset — a fact that was underscored in a course on Latin America he took last fall.

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Cummings, the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Professor of Psychology at Notre Dame, recently won the 2017 Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association’s developmental psychology section. Over the past 35 years, he has done extensive research to show that inter-parental relationships, father-child relationships, and other family relationships and processes are related to children’s short-term and long-term adjustment and well-being. With research projects in Northern Ireland, Colombia, Israel, Croatia, and Iran, he is also examining how political violence affects children's emotional security and development.

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A concurrent assistant professional specialist in the College of Arts and Letters, Thibert had served as acting director of the center since January. He previously served as assistant director of national fellowships, interim director, and associate director.

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The University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, in collaboration with the Office of the President, will host five Catholic university presidents on Sept. 5 for a lecture and panel to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the drafting and signing of the Land O’Lakes Statement.

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The National Institutes of Health awarded a new $3.5 million grant to Notre Dame’s William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families in support of a project for families that include a child with intellectual or developmental disabilities. The new Supporting Parent-Adolescent Relationships and Communication (ND-SPARC) project is designed to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention program to support families that include an individual with intellectual or developmental disabilities. 

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To preserve and share the history of political upheaval that ultimately changed the Latin American Catholic Church, Notre Dame researchers are collecting a variety of audio recordings, handwritten documents, and texts to develop a digital library of critical events that took place throughout Latin America over more than 60 years and ultimately changed the Catholic Church.

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Nanovic Hall, the state-of-the-art new home to the Departments of Economics, Political Science, and Sociology, their affiliated centers and programs, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, includes laboratory and research spaces, classrooms, and offices, all designed to encourage interaction between faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students. It features a soaring, three-story forum to be used for events, the latest video conferencing technology in each of the departmental suites, and a formal mediation room modeled after the United Nations that has translation capabilities for up to three languages.

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Sophomores and juniors from any major or college at the University of Notre Dame may participate in the semester-long Washington Program. Students live in apartments in downtown Washington, D.C., and take classes focused on politics and policy while also interning part-time with government offices, members of Congress, media companies, or cultural institutions. Students gain professional experience, learn to network, and experience the unique opportunities of big city living. 

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Darcia Narvaez, professor of psychology in the Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters and a fellow in the Institute for Educational Initiatives, has been named one of two winners of the first Expanded Reason Award for research. The award was given by University Francisco de Vitoria and the Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation to recognize innovation in scientific research and academic programs based on Benedict XVI’s proposal to broaden the horizons of reason. Narvaez’s book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom, was chosen from among more than 360 total entries from 170 universities and 30 countries. 

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The Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) at the University of Notre Dame has received multiple funding awards totaling nearly $700,000 this summer to continue its work reducing poverty and improving lives through evidence-based programs and policies. “We are excited about and thankful for the support from these funders,” said James Sullivan, co-founder of LEO and the Rev. Thomas J. McDonagh, C.S.C., Associate Professor of Economics. “This will allow us to continue to create evidence that supports programs doing innovative work to serve the poor.”

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Although working-age adult refugees who enter the United States often initially rely on public assistance programs, a study by researchers at the University of Notre Dame indicates that the long-term economic benefit of admitting refugees outweighs the initial costs. The study, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper this week, was conducted by William Evans, Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Economics, and Daniel Fitzgerald, undergraduate research assistant at Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities. 

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