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Paloma Garcia-Lopez — an educator, nonprofit leader, and manager with more than 15 years of experience — has been appointed associate director of the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame. In her new role, Garcia-Lopez will manage and oversee all of the activities and staff of the institute. Garcia-Lopez will focus on enhancing annual programming, special events, communications, fundraising and budgeting. She will be a central figure in the development of a strategic plan to support scholarly initiatives in Latino studies as a key component of Notre Dame’s academic mission.

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“We need to have much more proactive policies to include more women in the political process,” said Lakshmi Iyer, associate professor of economics and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Iyer’s research focuses on development economics and political economy. She is currently examining the consequences of electing women to political office in India as well as why certain minority groups there do not get into leadership positions. 

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The Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economics Opportunities (LEO) at the University of Notre Dame has received a nearly $350,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health in support of a major research initiative on homelessness prevention. The funding will support LEO’s efforts to measure the impact of emergency financial assistance on those at risk of homelessness. By studying the aid provided by homelessness prevention call centers, which process more than 15 million calls each year, LEO’s research will allow policymakers to make more informed choices in directing limited resources to the most effective programs. 

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Michelle Karnes believes imagination is the key to understanding medieval meditations about the life of Christ. When readers picture themselves holding Jesus as a baby or feeding him, it evokes powerful emotions, she said. “There are good cognitive reasons why imagining yourself participating in Christ’s life helps you engage with the narrative,” she said. “It causes you to invest yourself in a more profound way.” Karnes joins the faculty in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters this fall as an associate professor of English, after eight years at Stanford University.

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“What difference can faith make for morality when people today recognize that people of various or no faith can live a virtuous, honorable, moral life?” asked William Mattison, associate professor of theology in the College of Arts and Letters. Mattison is a Catholic moral theologian with particular interest in virtue. His latest book, The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017), examines the approach to morality that Jesus presents in Chapters 5-7 of the Gospel of St. Matthew and compares it to conceptions of happiness found in the works of classical philosophers such as Cicero and Aristotle.

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New research from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Louisville shows that the number of men in the field has risen substantially since 1960, a marker of changing economic and social trends.

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For Thomas Anderson, it’s hard not to be fascinated with Cuba. Anderson, a professor of Spanish and chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, has written two books on Cuban literature and culture and has published an edited volume of a leading Cuban author’s letters. Currently, he is working on a book that focuses on images of the U.S. civil rights movement in Cuban poetry. “I think for a lot of people, Cuba has always been seen as this forbidden country, and it’s something people are drawn to,” he said. “But it’s also a country with an incredibly rich literary and cultural history.”

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The retreat was sponsored by the International Network for Comparative Humanities (INCH), an interdisciplinary group of literary scholars from across the U.S. and Europe dedicated to promoting comparative study. Co-directed by Notre Dame professor Barry McCrea and Maria DiBattista of Princeton University, the organization seeks to develop a new model for networking and scholarly collaboration in the humanities — one that stresses the importance of collaboration across generational, national, and institutional boundaries.

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Nicholas J. Teh, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, along with London School of Economics colleague Bryan W. Roberts, was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to study the nature of observables.

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From the beginning, there’s an end in sight. For students in Notre Dame’s new Ph.D. in Italian and Ph.D. in Spanish programs — each of which launched in 2016 — the focus is on ensuring students complete their dissertations and earn their degrees within five years. The programs are attracting high-caliber students from around the world, helping to strengthen a flourishing community of scholars that includes students in successful master’s of arts programs already operating in each area. 

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In the past two years, 35 history majors in Paul Ocobock’s honors seminar have received more than $125,000 in funding to do original research around the world. And every student in his course who applied for funding received it — using the grants to explore archives in France, Ireland, Uganda, China, and South Korea, among other places. But to Ocobock, there is something even more important than his students’ 100 percent success rate in securing funding — the sense of community they develop as they plan their projects together, travel the globe to conduct research, then return to his classroom to begin work on their senior theses.

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An intellectual and cultural historian of modern Europe, Sarah Shortall joins the Department of History this fall as an assistant professor. She recently finished a junior research fellowship at Oxford University, is working on a book tentatively titled Soldiers of God in a Secular World: The Politics of Catholic Theology in Twentieth-Century France. The book examines the impact of Catholic theology on French politics after the separation of church and state in 1905, which she said is different from the separation of church and state in the United States.

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Therese Cory, an associate professor of philosophy, has been awarded a Philip L. Quinn Fellowship by the National Humanities Center, a private institute of advanced study in North Carolina. Cory is one of 34 fellows chosen from among 630 applicants and the fourth Arts and Letters faculty member to receive an NHC fellowship since 2010. It will allow her to spend the year working on her book manuscript, Aquinas’s Metaphysics of Intellect: Being and Being-About.

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This year’s report estimates poverty in the U.S. to be 12.7 percent for 2016, which is very close to the rate in 1980, suggesting little progress or change in the fight against poverty. However, the official poverty measure is flawed, according to James Sullivan, Rev. Thomas J. McDonagh, C.S.C., Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, and Bruce Meyer, McCormick Foundation Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

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A new study from researchers at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Central Florida shows that programs aimed at reducing early-term elective births have been successful, reducing the number of health complications in mothers and babies. Kasey Buckles, Brian and Jeannelle Brady Associate Professor of Economics at Notre Dame, and her co-author published the paper in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

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Corbett Family Hall strikes a stunning silhouette rising above the east side of Notre Dame Stadium. But for the Departments of Anthropology and Psychology, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Below the club seating, terraces, and press box on the building’s top three levels, faculty and students from these two social science departments will come together in the new 289,000-square-foot structure, made possible by a leadership gift from Notre Dame alumnus Richard Corbett. With classrooms, laboratories, and offices all under one massive roof, research and teaching efforts are united in a way that will bring untold benefits.

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In his opening remarks for “Land O’Lakes and Its Legacy,” on September 5, Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., suggested that among the essential activities of a university is to engage in discussion and debate about what its proper activities are. The examination included a lecture and panel discussion with four other Catholic university presidents in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the drafting and signing of the Land O’Lakes Statement. Arts and Letters Dean John T. McGreevy opened the event with a talk on the historical contexts of Land O’Lakes. He pointed to the impact of Vatican II, shifts in university and faculty governance, and a more global Church as essential backdrops for understanding the intentions of Land O’Lakes.

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“I'm interested in literature as product of a community and the way in which they decide what to include, what not to include, what is good, what is bad, how they choose to engage with censorship or not engage with censorship,” said Michel Hockx, professor of Chinese literature and culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in the College of Arts and Letters and director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. Hockx has published works both in English and in Chinese on early 20th-century Chinese print culture as well as contemporary Internet culture in China.

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Cummings, the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Professor of Psychology at Notre Dame, recently won the 2017 Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association’s developmental psychology section. Over the past 35 years, he has done extensive research to show that inter-parental relationships, father-child relationships, and other family relationships and processes are related to children’s short-term and long-term adjustment and well-being. With research projects in Northern Ireland, Colombia, Israel, Croatia, and Iran, he is also examining how political violence affects children's emotional security and development.

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In the nearly 100 years since women won the right to vote, a conventional wisdom about the aftermath of the 19th Amendment developed. Christina Wolbrecht believed that conventional wisdom needed to be challenged. In her book, the Notre Dame professor of political science and her co-author investigated and often upended long-held assumptions about women’s suffrage and offered new insight into the largest expansion of the electorate in American history. Their efforts earned them the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women and politics published in the past year.

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Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) announces four productions for its 2017-18 theatre season, with two comedies, including the beloved The Importance of Being Earnest; an absurdist classic relevant to the current political climate; and the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening.

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A concurrent assistant professional specialist in the College of Arts and Letters, Thibert had served as acting director of the center since January. He previously served as assistant director of national fellowships, interim director, and associate director.

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The French phrase extrême contemporain is the perfect description for what Sonja Stojanovic is most passionate about — the study of French literature written in the past decade or so. She waits with great anticipation for her favorite authors to release new books and enjoys talking with those writers because she is “right there as it is happening.” “Sometimes you are the first one to write on an author, which is very exciting,” she said. Stojanovic joins Notre Dame’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures this fall as an assistant professor of French.

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They wrote poetry in Dublin coffee shops over plates of scones and artfully embellished cappuccinos — the curl of steam and lilt of Irish conversation rising and fading in the background. They wrote prose on the grassy shores of Lough Pollaacapull, where the towers and crenellations of Kylemore Abbey reflect in the waters below. They wrote in the Abbey’s common room into the wee hours of the morning. And everywhere, the 16 students in Notre Dame’s first Creative Writing Workshop in Ireland found inspiration — in the landscape, in the country’s literary history, and in each other.

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The University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, in collaboration with the Office of the President, will host five Catholic university presidents on Sept. 5 for a lecture and panel to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the drafting and signing of the Land O’Lakes Statement.

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Jeff Harden, an assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science, has won the American Political Science Association’s Virginia Gray Award for the best book on U.S. state politics or policy published in the preceding three calendar years. In Multidimensional Democracy: A Supply and Demand Theory of Representation in American Legislatures, Harden examines the relationship between what citizens want from their elected state lawmakers and what legislators adopt as their top priorities while in office.

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The National Institutes of Health awarded a new $3.5 million grant to Notre Dame’s William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families in support of a project for families that include a child with intellectual or developmental disabilities. The new Supporting Parent-Adolescent Relationships and Communication (ND-SPARC) project is designed to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention program to support families that include an individual with intellectual or developmental disabilities. 

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To preserve and share the history of political upheaval that ultimately changed the Latin American Catholic Church, Notre Dame researchers are collecting a variety of audio recordings, handwritten documents, and texts to develop a digital library of critical events that took place throughout Latin America over more than 60 years and ultimately changed the Catholic Church.

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Enlightening. Enriching. Challenging. Sacred. Through the arts, you can find inspiration. Broaden understanding. Build community. And make a difference in the world. Notre Dame is home to a vibrant arts community with world-class facilities, internationally renowned faculty and visiting artists, and remarkable student engagement.

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Nanovic Hall, the state-of-the-art new home to the Departments of Economics, Political Science, and Sociology, their affiliated centers and programs, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, includes laboratory and research spaces, classrooms, and offices, all designed to encourage interaction between faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students. It features a soaring, three-story forum to be used for events, the latest video conferencing technology in each of the departmental suites, and a formal mediation room modeled after the United Nations that has translation capabilities for up to three languages.

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