Latest News

Brian Fogarty, director of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Science Research, has received a Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant from the National Science Foundation to study the prevalence of belief in voter fraud and to identify ways of restoring confidence in U.S. elections. Fogarty, who is also a concurrent associate professor of the practice in the Department of Political Science, sought the grant in order to develop research that could assess public opinion at a critical moment in American history.

Read More

“Music just really speaks to me. I feel like I'm at my happiest when I'm making music or thinking about music,” said Kola Owolabi, professor of organ at the University of Notre Dame. Owolabi is interested in a broad range of musical repertoire and enjoys finding works by less well-known composers. Recent recording projects include pieces by 20th-century African-English composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor, as well as a composition by 17th-century French composer Georg Muffat.

Read More

How can international development groups promote human dignity in their work — and why should they try? A new volume from the Kellogg Institute Book Series on Democracy and Development examines the meaning of “human dignity” – a term that encompasses human flourishing beyond the elimination of poverty – and asks how those who work in the field can put it into practice.

Read More

Patrick Griffin, a scholar whose work explores the intersection of colonial American and early modern Irish and British history, has been named the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. The prestigious fellowship, created in 1922, is awarded to a distinguished American historian who then spends a year teaching, researching and leading seminars at Oxford’s Queen’s College and Rothermere American Institute. 

Read More

Sarah A. Mustillo, a professor of sociology and the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, has been inducted into the Sociological Research Association. The prestigious honor society for scholars of sociology was founded in 1936 to recognize leading researchers in the discipline. It selects up to 14 new members each year from across the United States and Canada.

Read More

The Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study announced its faculty fellowship class for 2021-2022. The 11 residential fellows come from top research universities, including Notre Dame, and have diverse research interests that span the disciplines, including ecology, political science, anthropology, history, food studies and creative nonfiction. They will come together for a year of intensive collaborative research on resilience, the NDIAS’s organizing research theme for 2021-2022. The fellows will be joined by award-winning poet and cultural critic Reginald Dwayne Betts, who will serve as the NDIAS’s artist-in-residence during the year. 

Read More

Psychologist Jessica Payne is passionate about helping the world better understand the value of sleep — and the many ways it impacts our cognition, health, and longevity. She dreams of a society where people no longer take pride in how little sleep they need to get by, but how much they sleep in order to thrive. Her groundbreaking research on sleep, stress, and psychological function has led to her being selected as the National Academy of Sciences 2021 Seymour Benzer/Sydney Brenner Lecturer — and to being awarded a nearly $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Read More

The challenge for President Joe Biden’s administration is finding ways to emphasize the common values of religious and secular voters, Notre Dame researchers said. 

Read More

Two professors from the University of Notre Dame and the Institute for Educational Initiatives are among the 200 scholars named to the 2021 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, an annual listing published by Education Week of academics who had the year’s biggest impact on educational practice and policy. Ernest Morrell, the Coyle Professor in Literacy Education and director of the Notre Dame Center for Literacy Education, ranked 92nd in the 2021 list. Mark Berends, a professor of sociology, an associate vice president of research at Notre Dame and the director of the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity, placed 167th.

Read More

The University of Notre Dame has launched the Initiative on Race and Resilience, a new interdisciplinary program focused on the redress of systemic racism and the support of communities of color both within and beyond the Notre Dame campus. Led by the College of Arts & Letters with additional support from the Office of the Provost, the initiative will bring together scholars and students in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and other disciplines to challenge systemic racism and promote racial equality through research, education, and community empowerment. 

Read More

Notre Dame theologians from the World Religions World Church program will embark on a virtual teaching series examining the Catholic Church in a global religion context starting Jan. 26 and running through October. This program, hosted by ThinkND, will enable learners to enrich their understanding of the Church’s relationship with believers of other faiths around the world. Gabriel Reynolds, the Jerome J. Crowley and Rosaleen G. Crowley Professor of Theology, will lead the first four sessions that delve into the overlap between the Bible and the Quran, the historical relationship between the Church and Islam, and the theological tensions and harmonies between believers in both traditions.

Read More

This year’s unprecedented mid-year break led the University to create for the first time a Winter Session. This unique two-month period between semesters has removed the guardrails of what academics, researchers, counselors and service coordinators could normally imagine. Assistant Dean Collin Meissner said what could have been dead time has instead spurred some very creative ideas inspired by “just sheer intellectual enjoyment.”

Read More

Pete Buttigieg, former South Bend mayor, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and a faculty fellow in the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS), has been nominated to serve as Secretary of Transportation by President-elect Joe Biden.

Read More

Three faculty members from Notre Dame’s Department of Philosophy — Richard Cross, Katharina Kraus, and Samuel Newlands — have been offered fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Scholars in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters have received a total of 68 NEH fellowships since 1999 — more than any other university in the country. 

Read More

Klaus Lanzinger, professor emeritus in the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures, died Dec. 5. He was 92. A native of Austria whose research focused on American-European literary and cultural relations, Lanzinger served as chair of the department from 1989 to 1996. In the early 1960s, he was instrumental in creating one of Notre Dame’s two inaugural study abroad programs — in Innsbruck, Austria. Lanzinger later served as resident director of that program on three occasions.

Read More

Professor O. Carter Snead’s new book, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics, has garnered a great deal of attention since Harvard University Press released it in October. The book has been reviewed in numerous newspapers and magazines and discussed by top legal and political scholars on podcasts and academic panels. And now, the Wall Street Journal has named it one of the year’s top 10 books.

Read More

Sophie White, a professor in the Department of American Studies, has won the prestigious 2020 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for her work, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana. The prize, sponsored by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, recognizes the best book published in English on slavery, resistance, or abolition. It is considered one of the most distinguished awards for the study of global slavery.

Read More

Christopher Waller, the former Gilbert Schaefer Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, has been confirmed to the Federal Reserve’s seven-member Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. Waller, executive vice president and director of research at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday with a vote of 48-47. 

Read More

Neeta Verma’s teaching and research examines a range of social inequities facing the local community — including homelessness, poverty, and the digital divide. But the issue she finds most pressing is youth violence — and she believes that art and design can play a key role in breaking its vicious cycle. With a grant from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, she is launching a two-year project that will use community-designed public art installations and youth programming to address this systemic problem.

Read More

Catherine Bolten discusses her research and upcoming presentation for the Health and Well-being Initiative's "COVID-19: What Comes Next?" virtual forum on December 4.

Read More

Edward Manier, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, died on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 26) at his home in South Bend. He was 89.

Read More

La Donna Forsgren, an associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, has won the American Society for Theatre Research's Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize. The award, given annually to the best essay of theatre research in a scholarly English-language publication, honored Forsgren’s “The Wiz Redux; or Why Queer Black Feminist Spectatorship and Politically Engaged Popular Entertainment Continue to Matter,” which appeared in Theatre Survey. She was also appointed this month as associate editor of Theatre Survey, which will lead to her becoming editor of the journal in two years.

Read More

While early modern artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi has been principally known for his drawings and etchings of ancient Rome, new research from Heather Hyde Minor, a Notre Dame professor of art history, reinterprets Piranesi’s artistic oeuvre by flipping the works over and reading what is written on the backs. Minor’s Piranesi Unbound, examines nearly 200 of Piranesi’s engravings and drawings. The research, recuperative in method, serves as a biography of Piranesi’s books, bringing text and image together to reveal a learned mind alive with biting wit and unflinching big-picture questions.

Read More

Notre Dame sociologist Abigail Ocobock has interviewed 80 parents with at least one child in elementary or middle school. All of the parents work full time and are expected to facilitate e-learning for their children. Popular media and academic studies have highlighted how working moms experience significant guilt. Ocobock found that the effects of COVID-19 increased the level of guilt.

Read More

Buttigieg, currently a faculty fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, will discuss “Rebuilding Trust in Our Nation’s Institutions” at 8:15 p.m. EDT Oct. 21 (Wednesday).

Read More

The Homeless Prevention Call Center for the City of Chicago, currently run by Catholic Charities of Chicago, has helped thousands of families stay off the streets. Knowing funding for public programs is never guaranteed, it wanted to prove its method was cost effective and impactful. In 2012, it approached Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) for assistance. Could LEO researchers measure the call center’s effectiveness rather than volume?

Read More

La Donna L. Forsgren is an associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre; concurrent faculty in the Gender Studies Program; and affiliated faculty in the Department of Africana Studies. Her latest book, Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of Black Arts Movement Theater and Performance, is the first oral history to fully explore the contributions of Black women intellectuals to the Black Arts Movement. 

Read More

A digital image of a famous piece of art doesn’t tend to stir the soul in the same way as looking at it while standing in the same room. The context matters. Notre Dame theology and psychology faculty will extrapolate on that idea thanks to a $230,000 grant from the Templeton Religion Trust for an 18-month research project exploring the ways in which viewing art informs and enhances spiritual growth and how that changes based on time and place. The researchers will focus on two sets of religious art on the Notre Dame campus — The Stations of the Cross by Luigi Gregori in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, and The Life of Christ/Cycle of Life by Philip Rickey in the Charles B. Hayes Family Sculpture Park.

Read More

“There's no escaping metaphysics, but why would we want to? It's so interesting and so fun to pursue,” said Kris McDaniel, a Notre Dame professor of philosophy. His research focuses on existence and value — in particular, exploring the idea that there are different kinds of existence, a position that is contrary to most contemporary philosophical scholarship.

Read More

Christina Wolbrecht, a professor of political science and affiliated faculty member in the Gender Studies Program, has been awarded a Centennial Center Special Projects Fund grant from the American Political Science Association. With the grant, she and a team of colleagues are planning to broaden the impact of the organization Women Also Know Stuff by hosting a virtual conference in early 2021 that will bring together journalists and scholars.

Read More