Pope Francis’ forthcoming encyclical on the environment, titled “Laudato Sii,” has elicited indecorous responses, including questions about whether the environment has anything to do with the teachings of the Catholic Church. Theologians and scientists at the University of Notre Dame, however, insist that it precisely concerns Church teaching, and they look forward to hearing what Pope Francis has to say.
Sacred Music at Notre Dame: The Voice of the Text, an exhibition in the Hesburgh Libraries Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, highlights the University’s holdings in medieval liturgical manuscripts that contain music. The manuscripts from the 11th through 15th centuries originate from various regions in France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. They inclued a a psalter, a liturgical calendar, a gradual, and a diurnal.
Anne Seul ’15, a history and French major, spent the summer of 2014 conducting research at the Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the French capital’s historical library. Her research focused on perceptions of Denis Diderot, the 18th-century French philosopher best known as the chief editor of Encyclopédie and a key figure influencing the French Revolution. “It’s a new challenge. I’ve never done anything remotely like this by myself—living on my own and being in charge of this big project,” she said.
For Ebrahim Moosa, the chance to develop an elite Islamic studies program at a Catholic university is full of opportunity. “Catholics and Muslims can potentially embark on a series of meaningful conversations on common concerns,” he said. “There are challenges both Catholics and Muslims face on gender issues, science, evolution, and values. How do strong religious values survive in the midst of formidable social and political challenges?
It’s both the bane of many parents and what has been called a major national vulnerability: the inability of many children to learn mathematics. Understanding that problem and developing strategies to overcome it is the research focus of Nicole McNeil, Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, and the researchers in her lab.
Notre Dame honored 124 graduating seniors embarking on a year or more of service were honored during the University’s annual Service Send-Off ceremony May 16 in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center’s Leighton Concert Hall.
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.
During the summer of 2014, Patrick Butler and Patrick Valencia interned at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in Dublin, Ireland. Both internships were sponsored by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Without that support, Valencia said, he wouldn’t have been able to “have this wonderful experience living abroad.”
Anthropology major Alexis Palá has spent the past three years studying opportunities for adults with intellectual disabilities in Chile and Spain. Next year, she will continue her research in Chile with support from a Fulbright U.S. Student Award.
“I knew I wanted to major in Irish; I did not expect to end up in Ireland my first summer,” said Caelin Miltko, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Letters. During the summer of 2014, Miltko interned at the National Folklore Collection of Ireland based at University College Dublin. Her work centered on digitizing the Schools Collection, a group of manuscripts gathered by Irish schoolchildren in the 1930s featuring stories and traditions from their families.
Stefanie Israel, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology, has been awarded a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship to support her comparative ethnography of four “pacified” favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Earlier this year, she was awarded a Fulbright Study-Research Grant for the same project. The funding will allow Israel to spend all of 2016 conducting research in Rio. She will observe urban reform efforts in favela communities at a key point in time: before, during, and after the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, which have been a focus of protests sweeping across Brazil.
Nicole McNeil, Notre Dame’s ACE Associate Professor of Psychology—along with her colleagues at the nonprofit research agency West Ed—received a $3.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, which aims to improve students’ mathematical achievement in elementary school and beyond. The grant will allow a large-scale trial of an educational intervention McNeil and her CLAD Lab research team have developed to boost math learning by helping students grasp the concept of mathematical equivalence.
Luis Ricardo Fraga, a pioneer in the field of Latino politics, and Timothy Matovina, a leading expert on Latino Catholicism, have been appointed co-directors of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, effective July 1, 2015. “The combination of skills that they bring to the institute is spectacular,” said John McGreevy, I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, where ILS is housed.
The Kellogg Institute for International Studies has named five graduating seniors—all of whom have majors or minors in the College of Arts and Letters—as recipients of its International Development Fellowships (IDF) for the coming year. Members of the Notre Dame Class of 2015 Megan Fuerst, Matthew Hing, Emily Mediate, Chris Newton, and Laura Zillmer will work with four partner organizations across the developing world in the second year of the recently expanded program.
Four University of Notre Dame students—including three from the College of Arts and Letters—received an Undergraduate Library Research Award (ULRA) for their exemplary research skills during a special event at the eighth annual Undergraduate Scholars Conference on May 1. More than 80 undergraduate research and scholarship projects were showcased at the conference.
“All people deserve to live a life in dignity. Currently, many of the poorest and most vulnerable individuals in our world are not realizing that right.” Anthropology major Kristen Kelly ’13 is driven by this simple and universal truth, one that she first discovered while pursuing an International Development Studies (IDS) minor through Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute.
New research at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Research on Educational Opportunity will focus on the implications of Indiana’s school choice laws on students’ friendships and achievements. Notre Dame sociologists Megan Andrew and Jennifer Flashman have received a $600,000 grant from the W.T. Grant Foundation and a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation. They will collect and evaluate new data about middle school students in Indiana, which is known for its robust school choice programs.
Julie Turner, associate professor of psychology and fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives, has been named the new lead editor of the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) American Educational Research Journal. Two other institute fellows—Mark Berends, distinguished sociologist of education and director of the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity (CREO), and Alison Cheng, associate professor of psychology—will work with Turner as a co-editor and an associate editor, respectively.
Furiously strumming his jarana into the early morning hours of a stranger’s backyard birthday party in Austin, Texas, Alex Chavez was having fun with the hired musicians who had brought him along as an impromptu guest. He was also doing fieldwork. Chavez, who joined Notre Dame’s Department of Anthropology in 2014 as an assistant professor, studies “the aesthetic dimensions of contemporary lived politics”— sometimes referred to as cultural poetics. He focuses on the unfolding of this expressive grammar among Latino migrant communities in the United States.
Is physical activity a factor in how friendships are formed? Do social circles influence a person’s health and fitness choices? A team of Notre Dame researchers hopes to explore those questions with the help of smartphone apps and wearable technology devices. Faculty members in the University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science and Applications (iCeNSA) have been awarded a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the relationship between social networks and health-related behaviors.
Glynn Scholar Anna Kottkamp, an environmental science major from Wenatchee, Washington, has been named valedictorian of the 2015 University of Notre Dame graduating class and will present the valedictory address during the University Commencement Ceremony on Sunday, May 17, at Notre Dame Stadium. The Commencement invocation will be offered by Brendan Bell, a political science major from Havertown, Pennsylvania.
Lewis E. Nicholson, professor emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame, died Tuesday, April 28, at his home in South Bend. He was 93. A renowned scholar in medieval and Anglo-Saxon studies and a member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1958, Nicholson taught courses ranging from Beowulf, Chaucer, and Middle English metrical romance to classes on the Gothic language and Old Norse. For the last 18 years of his life, he directed the Hesburgh Library’s Medieval Library Initiative.
A group of Catholic scholars and Church leaders, including University of Notre Dame president Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., will gather at the University Monday, April 27 and Tuesday, April 28 to examine the problem of polarization among American Catholics and to propose ways it might be resisted and overcome. The conference, Polarization in the U.S. Catholic Church: Naming the Wounds, Beginning to Heal, opens at 4:30 p.m. Monday in Notre Dame’s McKenna Hall auditorium.
“I’m thrilled to be a part of this project and to be in Dublin. It’s an amazing opportunity,” said Katie Brennan, a sociology major in the College of Arts and Letters. During the summer of 2014, Brennan and three other University of Notre Dame undergraduates interned on the production of 1916: The Irish Rebellion, a three-part television documentary set to air on PBS, the BBC, and Irish broadcaster RTÉ in 2016.
A new book by Notre Dame professor Ebrahim Moosa offers an expansive introduction to madrasas, the most common kind of religious schools in the Islamic world. “I wrote this book for those who are curious and eager to know what exactly transpires in these institutions,” said Moosa, professor of Islamic Studies and author of What Is a Madrasa?, recently published by the University of North Carolina Press.“I see myself as a translator between the world inside the walls of the madrasa and those on the outside.
The University of Notre Dame’s Division of Student Affairs recognized seven students at the annual Student Leadership Awards Banquet on Tuesday, March 31, six of whom majored in the College of Arts and Letters. Another award winner will be honored at the Graduate School Awards Ceremony on Friday, May 15. These annual awards recognize current students who have made exceptional contributions to the Notre Dame community.
“Women religious have tended to get pigeonholed in certain way, that either they were only praying the monastic hours or maybe just caring for their own, pastorally speaking, but they were doing much more than that,” said Katie Bugyis, a Ph.D. candidate in medieval studies through the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute.
The University of Notre Dame will play a major role in the international celebration of the centenary of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising, which was announced Tuesday, March 31 in Dublin by Taoiseach Enda Kenny. A documentary television series, 1916: The Irish Rebellion, produced by Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, will be broadcast worldwide during the centenary, which memorializes the events in Dublin on Easter Week a century ago, when an insurrection started a process that culminated in an independent Irish state and accelerated the disintegration of the British Empire.
“I actually knew that I wanted to do graduate work at Notre Dame when I was a sophomore in college,” said Amy Seymour, a Ph.D. candidate in Notre Dame’s graduate program in philosophy. Seymour chose Notre Dame, she said, because of the reputation of the University’s Center for Philosophy of Religion.
Chinese civil rights activist and former political prisoner Chen Guangcheng will give the University of Notre Dame’s 2015 Human Dignity Lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 7 in the McKenna Hall Auditorium. Chen’s lecture, “Interpreting Reform: Human Dignity and Human Rights in Contemporary China,” is sponsored by Notre Dame’s Institute for Church Life.