Fifteen Notre Dame students who studied in the College of Arts and Letters have received grants from the Fulbright program, the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program. A total of 18 students were named Fulbright finalists—the most grantees the University has ever had in the program.
The University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education will send forth 272 Catholic school teachers and leaders to nearly 200 Catholic schools across the country in the annual Missioning Mass, capping two months of professional formation and spiritual renewal. The ceremony, scheduled for 9:30 a.m. July 24 in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, will celebrate and bless the next steps on the educators’ journeys back to their respective schools and classrooms.
A White House Council of Economic Advisers report released July 14 includes an account of Reading for Life, a local juvenile diversion program that is being evaluated by the University of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities. The report, “Economic Costs of Youth Disadvantage and High-Return Opportunities for Change,” features the RFL program, which has been used at the St. Joseph County Juvenile Justice Center since 2007.
Two recent Notre Dame graduates are tackling global health issues with support from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. French and Francophone studies major Claire Donovan will work with UNICEF in Togo to examine women’s adherence to micronutrient supplement programs. Christina Gutierrez, who majored in Romance languages and literatures and political science, will pursue a master’s degree at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy and conduct research on and pilot a food co-op concept there.
Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities has received a $435,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health for a two-year study of Stay the Course, a program designed to keep low-income community college students on the path to academic success. Participants are paired with a case manager who offers guidance and support on how to stay on track to graduate or transfer to a four-year college. They are also directed to affordable child care or other social services that will aid them in their pursuit of an education.
A team of researchers in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters has been awarded a $3.1 million grant from the Templeton Religion Trust to examine how the concrete practices of science relate to something more abstract—what theologians and philosophers consider “virtues”—and how that connects with other areas of scientists’ lives, including their religious beliefs. The endeavor is a key component of Notre Dame’s new Center for Theology, Science, and Human Flourishing, which will serve as a hub for transdisciplinary research at the University.
University of Notre Dame faculty members continue to comment on the new encyclical Laudato Si, issued by Pope Francis in Rome on June 18. In an op-ed in Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune, Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., writes that, “It is characteristic of this pope to speak as the Catholic leader but to seek to build bridges to all people who promote friendship and cooperation serving the good of all.”
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the former president of the Republic of Indonesia, spoke at the University of Notre Dame’s inaugural Asia Leadership Forum last week at the invitation of Notre Dame’s president, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. The forum featured a panel discussion, “Indonesian Islam: A Force for Democracy and Peace,” and was sponsored by Notre Dame’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.
Maxim Kantor is the portrait of a character from a well-crafted Hollywood political drama: an artist, writer, and philosopher whose early work went largely unnoticed in Cold War Russia because it did not conform to the tastes of the Soviet regime. Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study hosted the artist as its Director’s Fellow in 2015.
Science and religion teachers from Catholic high schools nationwide are meeting at the University of Notre Dame June 14 to 19 to debunk the notion that their academic disciplines contradict each other. The week-long seminar hosted by the Institute for Church Life attracted some 90 Catholic high school teachers of biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and religion from 23 dioceses from across the country.
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?
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.
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.
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.