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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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Pierpaolo Polzonetti, an associate professor in Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies (PLS) and Sacred Music at Notre Dame program, has won the H. Colin Slim Award for his essay, “Tartini and the Tongue of Saint Anthony.” The award, presented by the American Musicological Society since 2005, honors a “musicological article of exceptional merit.”

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Before the rigors of post-college life set in—before mortgages, family, a career, and all the other responsibilities that come with setting off into the world—Kaitlin Sullivan ’10 wanted to devote at least one year of her life to service. Sullivan remembers talking with professors and fellow students at Notre Dame about how the purpose of their education wasn’t just learning for the sake of learning, but to help them to go out and do good in the world. It’s a perspective she carried into her service experience—and in her professional career as a product policy manager for Facebook.

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Pope Francis has ignited increased public interest in the future of the Catholic Church, and Kathleen Sprows Cummings hopes she can use that to remind people of the Church’s past. Cummings, an associate professor of American studies and history and the William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame, begins her term this month as vice president/president-elect of the American Catholic Historical Association.

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In the summer of 2015, Emily Campagna interned at Oracle Japan, handling a variety of responsibilities, including competitor analysis, mid-market analysis to help find new clients, and research to improve the company’s employee culture. Sponsored by Notre Dame’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, the Oracle Japan Summer Internship program supports successful applicants in a project-based internship experience at the Tokyo offices of Oracle, a world-leader in cloud computing and software services.

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Beginning on Jan. 18, the University of Notre Dame will host a weeklong series of events, called Walk the Walk Week, to reflect on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and encourage dialogue about diversity and inclusion.

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Notre Dame sociologist Ann Mische, a scholar of social movements in Brazil and around the world, has an intense interest in how citizens in a democracy debate their futures and engage in collective efforts to bring about social and political change. In her work, she investigates processes and styles of communication and decision making across civil society networks and their implications for democracy, development, and social justice.

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Unless you have a conversation to really understand culture, you can’t make effective change. That’s what Emily Campbell ’17 learned during her Kellogg Institute Experiencing the World fellowship last summer. Her experience in Rwanda focused her future academic work, affirmed her career goals, and motivated her to make lasting international development change.

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A five-year collaboration between institutions in the United States and Sweden has resulted in a new, public dataset for researchers of democracy. According to Notre Dame political scientist and Kellogg Faculty Fellow Michael Coppedge, one of four principal investigators who have led the five-year effort, the data release promises to “revolutionize” quantitative research on democracy.

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Three faculty from the University of Notre Dame received fellowships this week from the National Endowment for the Humanities, continuing the University’s record success winning support for humanities research. Receiving the grants are Julia Douthwaite, a professor of French; Amy Mulligan, an assistant professor of Irish language and literature; and Gabriel Said Reynolds, a professor of Islamic studies and theology. Since 1999, College of Arts and Letters faculty have won 57 NEH fellowships—more than any other private university in the country.

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The Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters is launching a new minor in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). The program offers students the opportunity to study linguistics education, learn how to teach English, and develop classroom management and lesson planning skills.

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Jessica Payne never dreamed of becoming a rising star in the science of sleep. In fact, until midway through graduate school, she didn’t think much about the subject beyond her own off-and-on problems getting some shut-eye. Now, she can’t keep it off her mind. Payne’s tireless work recently earned her the "Psychonomic Society’s Early Career Award, given to individuals who have made significant contributions to scientific psychology early in their careers.

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During the summer of 2015, Notre Dame history and political science major Matt Souza interviewed laborers in multiple Chinese cities. The goal of his research was to determine whether the official ideology of the Communist Party is still influential amongst Chinese citizens. “All of my findings, they’re actually quite different from all the previous research, and I really want to get my ideas and all my findings out to the public,” he said. Souza’s research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program in the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

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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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For married couples, the odds aren’t good when one partner has anxiety or depression. The presence of such a mental issue significantly increases the risk that the couple will get divorced. Notre Dame psychology Ph.D. student Judith Biesen wants to find a way to improve the outcomes for those couples. With an American Dream grant from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, Biesen is completing a longitudinal study of mental health—specifically, anxiety disorders and depression—and how it relates to marital functioning and satisfaction with the relationship.

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A new interdisciplinary fellowship program launched by the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Educational Initiatives will train graduate students in state-of-the-art quantitative methods, allowing them to examine the impact of educational policies, programs, and practices. Beginning in fall 2016, the Rev. James A. Burns Fellowship is open to prospective students applying to Ph.D. programs in economics, political science, psychology, and sociology who plan to pursue educational research.

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In a new book, Education and Empowered Citizenship in Mali (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), Jaimie Bleck, an assistant professor of political science, explores the relationship between schooling, political knowledge, and political participation in Mali, where access to education nearly tripled in the two decades following the country’s 1991 transition to multiparty democracy.

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Sarah Tomas Morgan, Scott Copeland, and JesusisLord Nwadiuko were three of 60 College of Arts and Letters students who engaged in an immersive cultural and linguistic experience through the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures’ Summer Language Abroad program. Through intensive language coursework and daily interaction with native speakers, students rapidly enhanced their command of a foreign language—be it Arabic, Cantonese, Chinese, French, German, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, or Swahili.

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Emmie Mediate, a 2015 graduate of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, has been selected to the American Rhodes Scholar Class of 2016. A native of Colorado Springs, Colorado, Mediate was one of 32 Rhodes Scholars selected from a pool of 869 candidates who had been nominated by their colleges and universities. She is Notre Dame’s 17th Rhodes Scholar and the University’s second in two years.

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The University of Notre Dame hosted its 10th annual Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) orientation in August 2015. Sixty-four scholars from 29 countries gathered at Notre Dame to celebrate their arrival in America and prepare for the upcoming year of teaching their native languages in universities across the U.S.

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A football game isn’t the only thing Notre Dame is bringing to Boston in late November. As part of a weekend of events surrounding the Shamrock Series, Notre Dame’s annual home-away-from-home football game, the College of Arts and Letters will host a pair of academic conversations the day before the Fighting Irish face Boston College at Fenway Park. Notre Dame historians will offer an interdisciplinary look at the impact of Irish immigration on American religious and political structures, as well as the role of the U.S. in the 1916 Easter Rising, while economists will discuss research initiatives that aim to change the way humanitarian services help the poor both domestically and abroad.

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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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They bring expertise in subjects that span physical borders and chronological boundaries. They bring passion to their research and energy to their classrooms. And the six new faculty members joining the Department of History this fall bring additional prestige to an already elite group of academics. “For a long period of time, we’ve been working to assemble a group of scholars that could work across national boundaries, redefining the department and what it does," said Patrick Griffin, chair of the department.

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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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Notre Dame Research, together with Notre Dame International, invite faculty in all Colleges and Schools to apply for inaugural Rome Global Gateway Faculty Research Award. Grants for any amount up to $50,000 of total funding for a period of up to one year are available through the program.

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An interdisciplinary research collaborative between the University of Notre Dame and Cornell University has awarded nearly $2 million to 18 projects in five countries. The researchers will examine the theoretical, empirical, and practical dimensions of hope and optimism. The project, Hope and Optimism: Conceptual and Empirical Investigations, is funded through a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation and additional money from Notre Dame and Cornell.

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The Cross-Cultural Leadership Program (CCLP) is a three-credit, eight-week summer course administered by Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. This service learning experience immerses students in organizations serving Latino communities in either Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C. All living expenses are covered for the students during the program. “We’re able to go out into the community, speak Spanish, and really relate to the people on the ground level. I couldn’t have asked for anything better,” said Gregory Jenn, a junior political science and Romance languages major.

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The projects took them them to Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and England. The research offers new insights into the Renaissance, Protestantism, immigrant religiousness, monks, and begging practices. Eight graduate students from Notre Dame’s Department of History received competitive fellowships or grants in support of their research—awards including a Rome Prize, a Fulbright, and Louisville Institute, Newcombe, and Schallek fellowships.

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Indiana’s school choice program is one of the largest in the United States. Until now, little has been known about how this initiative to increase parents’ educational options for their children is affecting either the schools or the students. A Notre Dame sociologist will now get to examine a range of those effects, thanks to a $1 million grant from The Spencer Foundation. The award will fund a three-year study in a ground-breaking initiative with data allowing for comparisons among traditional public, charter, and private schools.

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As far as titles in academic journals go, it’s quite the attention-getter. “There is no such thing as infant sleep, there is no such thing as breastfeeding, there is only breastsleeping,” reads the title of a new peer-reviewed commentary piece by University of Notre Dame anthropologists James McKenna and Lee Gettler that appears in the prestigious European journal Acta Paediatrica.

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