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Marie Lynn Miranda, announced as the successor to Thomas Burish in mid-March, is no stranger to leading a university through a crisis. Now the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost at Notre Dame, the former provost of Rice University and a distinguished scholar in the field of children’s environmental health organized the school's disaster response in the wake of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. “Throughout our lives, we are confronted with situations where we don’t quite know what to do,” she said. “We don’t know what the best thing is and we don’t necessarily have all the expertise we might ideally have. We must bring data and analysis and the best technical advice there is. But when in doubt, responding with love is always a good choice.”

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The University of Notre Dame in partnership with IBM today launched a collaboration that will address the myriad ethical concerns raised by the use of advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and quantum computing, to address society’s most pressing problems. Funded by a 10-year, $20 million IBM commitment, the new Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab will conduct applied research and promote models for the ethical application of technology within the tech sector, business and government.
 

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Mark McKenna, the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law and director of the Law School’s Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law, has been named the founding director of the University of Notre Dame’s Technology Ethics Center. ND-TEC was formed as a result of interest and leadership from Sarah Mustillo, dean of the College of Arts and Letters, and Provost Thomas G. Burish.

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The Kylemore Abbey Global Centre, along with six partners from across the University of Notre Dame campus, has launched the Kylemore Book Club, an open, multimedia, educational enrichment program featuring Notre Dame’s expert faculty. The debut program, “Literature and Film in Lockdown,” is led by Professor of English and the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies Barry McCrea. 

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Agustín Fuentes, the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C. Chair in Anthropology, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers. He is among more than 250 members of the 240th AAAS class, which includes singer-songwriter Joan Baez, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, and filmmaker Richard Linklater.

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What Karen Graubart didn’t find in archives in Spain and Peru was, in some ways, as valuable as what she did. An associate professor in the Department of History, Graubart has spent more than 15 years conducting archival research on women and non-dominant communities in the Iberian Empire for her first two books. But she is also considering how the archives themselves have shaped her research — by questioning who is represented in them and why.

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Gilburt Loescher, a longtime Notre Dame political scientist and an international expert on refugee and humanitarian issues, died April 28 of heart failure. He was 75. In 2003, he was in Baghdad, Iraq, when a suicide bomber attacked United Nations offices at the Canal Hotel. Loescher was among the more than 150 people injured in the attack, his wounds life-threatening, with doctors giving him only a 25 percent chance of survival. It took rescuers more than four hours to extract him from the rubble, amputating his legs in the process.

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Sophie White, a professor in the Department of American Studies, offered an exceptional glimpse into the lives of the enslaved — through their own words — in her latest book, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana. She recently won two awards for the work — the Kemper and Leila Williams Book Prize and the 2020 Summerlee Book Prize. White also received an honorable mention for the Merle Curti Award for best book in American social history from the Organization of American Historians.

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Katie Jarvis, an associate professor in the Department of History, has been awarded the Louis A. Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for her work, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France. The book is the first study of the Parisian market women — the Dames des Halles — during the French Revolution and explores how the Dames’ political activism and economic activities shaped the nature of nascent democracy and capitalism through daily commerce.

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In a world with more than 70 million displaced persons, the average refugee will spend more than 17 years displaced, with many settling long-term in refugee camps dependent on humanitarian aid. The continued prevalence and growth of protracted refugee camps has become unsustainable for host states and insufficient for refugees, who have the right to dignified and productive lives. In 2019, the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Research Technical Assistance Center (RTAC) commissioned Notre Dame’s Department of Anthropology and Pulte Institute for Global Development to help them understand the personal, economic, and social complexities that may affect refugee and host community self-sufficiency. 

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La Donna Forsgren writes because she has something to say — and because the people she writes about had something to say, too. An assistant professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, Forsgren’s research shines a light on the essential role African American women have played in theatre history. She has written two books on female dramatists in the Black Arts Movement and is now working on a third focusing on women in contemporary black musical theatre.

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Acclaimed organist Kola Owolabi will join the faculty of the Department of Music and Sacred Music at Notre Dame this fall as professor of music and head of the Graduate Organ Studio. Owolabi — whose expertise includes a broad range of organ repertoire, composition, choral conducting, church music, and improvisation — will replace Craig Cramer, who is retiring at the end of the academic year.

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Ian Johnson is the P.J. Moran Family Assistant Professor of Military History at the University of Notre Dame. His research themes include military, politics, science, technology, and medicine. In this video, he discusses his book project examining secret military cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1920s and '30s, how the peace established after World War I fell apart, and how the peace after World War II resulted in modern institutions.

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Notre Dame researchers Jon Coleman, professor of history, and Emily Wang, assistant professor of Russian, have been named fellows in the 2020 cohort of American Council of Learned Societies. The fellowships honor scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and Coleman and Wang were among 81 winners selected from nearly 1,200 applicants.

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Pamela Wojcik, a professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, has been awarded a 2020 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in support of her book project, Unhomed: Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema. Wojcik is among 175 scholars, artists, and scientists to be awarded fellowships this year from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants. Faculty in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters have won 18 Guggenheim fellowships in the last 20 years.

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Notre Dame anthropologist Alex Chávez has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities long-term residential fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago. During the nine-month fellowship, Chávez will work on a second book project, tentatively titled Audible City: Urban Cultural History, Latinx Chicago, and the Sonic Commons, which explores the relationship between sound and the city of Chicago.

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At Notre Dame’s William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families, psychology experts address and study other aspects of health that contribute to healthy family life. Having to turn a physical space that is normally bustling with moms and dads and their children into a virtual environment that preserves research continuity and continues to provide services is not easy, but that’s exactly what the Shaw Center researchers and staff are doing. Several programs at the center have been converted to a telehealth model, including the child and family therapy clinic and a number of parenting programs such as the Notre Dame Families & Babies Study (ND-FABS). 

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In a first-of-its-kind study, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) today, economics professor Daniel Hungerman and graduate student Vivek Moorthy investigated the long-term effects of that momentous eco-celebration, studying how the event and the weather that day affected people’s attitudes toward conservation and their health years later.

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Christina Wolbrecht is professor of political science, director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy, and the C. Robert and Margaret Hanley Family Director of the Notre Dame Washington Program. She studies American politics, gender/women, political parties, and American political development. In this video, she discusses her definitive research on how women voted across the first 100 years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

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Students, parents of students, alumni, faculty and staff, have donated nearly $40,000 toward the coronavirus response in St. Joseph County — specifically for personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers and others who may come into close contact with the virus.

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In this Q&A, Christopher Baron, an associate professor of classics and concurrent associate professor of history, discusses his research on Greek historians living in the Roman Empire and how we grapple with similar questions today, as well as the strange and interesting things he's learned while editing an encyclopedia on Herodotus — the "Father of History."

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Emilia Justyna Powell wants to change how people see Islamic law and culture — because too often, she’s found, people in the West have an inaccurate view of it as strict or outdated. She has spent five years traveling to Muslim-majority countries and interviewing Muslim scholars for her new book exploring the similarities and differences between the Islamic legal tradition and classical international law.

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From philosophy to musical theatre to economics, Arts and Letters faculty are using technological innovations — as well as creativity, patience, and empathy — to continue the educational experience for their students as the University shifts to online classes in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The sudden shift has prompted adaptation in the face of adversity — from defending a dissertation via Zoom meeting to posting and analyzing behind-the-scenes clips of rehearsal for a musical that won't be performed — but it has also already helped faculty and students forge new bonds with each other.

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In a letter today to the Class of 2020, University of Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., announced that the University Commencement Ceremony on May 17 will be held online rather than in Notre Dame Stadium, and that an on-campus celebration has been scheduled for the spring of 2021. Father Jenkins made the decision after discussions with experts on infectious diseases, University deans, and student government and class officers as he continued to monitor the spread of the novel coronavirus.

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The University of Notre Dame is donating personal protective equipment from labs across the University in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has led to a shortage of such equipment among local doctors, nurses and first responders on the front lines of the outbreak. Labs across campus are donating gloves, masks, face shields, goggles, isolation gowns and other personal protective equipment for delivery to St. Joseph County Unified Command. In addition, Liang Cai, an assistant professor of history, is organizing the donation of personal protective equipment from China with help from Notre Dame alumni and the parents of Notre Dame students in that country.

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Notre Dame’s International Security Center (NDISC) has named James Webb its first distinguished fellow. Webb — a Vietnam Marine combat veteran, former senator, and former secretary of the Navy — is a national security and foreign policy specialist and the author of 10 books. “It is an honor and a distinct pleasure to be working with the leadership and students of Notre Dame,” Webb said. “I look forward to both teaching and learning through my interactions over the coming months.”

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The University of Notre Dame is launching a bachelor of arts in computer science major, offering undergraduate students the opportunity to obtain rigorous training in the rapidly advancing areas where computer science intersects with the arts, humanities, or social sciences. Housed in the College of Arts and Letters, the program will involve significant coursework in the College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering while offering enough flexibility for students to enroll in an Arts and Letters program — a major, supplementary major, minor, or 15-credit hour course sequence of their own design.

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Gabriel Said Reynolds, professor of Islamic studies and theology at Notre Dame, has been appointed by Pope Francis as consultor to the Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims, which is part of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. The appointment lasts five years, and the commission meets annually in Rome to debrief and advise on the Church’s relations with Muslims.

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In this Q&A, Brooke Ammerman, an assistant professor of psychology, discusses her research on the risk factors and protective factors for self-injurious behaviors, how her work maps onto the University mission, and why undergraduate and graduate students are essential to her research.

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Mark Berends, the director of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Research on Educational Opportunity and a professor of sociology, has been elected to the National Academy of Education. The Academy advances high-quality research that improves education quality and practice. Members are elected on the basis of outstanding scholarship related to education.

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