It's important to understand how programs affect the cycle of poverty, said Chloe Gibbs, assistant professor of economics. “Head Start set the first-generation kids on a different trajectory, and now their kids are better off. I think this is exactly what we hope to do through these kinds of social programs.”
The annual honor recognizes Jeff Harden as the top scholar in the field of state politics and policy who has earned a Ph.D. within the previous 10 years. He said it’s a meaningful time to be studying state legislatures because they have enormous power in what people's lives look like as citizens of this country.
Michelle Karnes, a Notre Dame associate professor of English, has been chosen as a Mellon Fellow by The Huntington, a collections-based research and educational institution in California. During the yearlong fellowship that begins in July, Karnes will work on journal articles and a chapter for her next book project, tentatively titled “Interanimalia: The Species of the Medieval World,” which focuses on the value of species diversity in the natural world.
Ying (Alison) Cheng is a professor of psychology, a fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives, and associate director of the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society at the University of Notre Dame. In this interview, she discusses her research on psychological and educational measurement, and how she and her team use statistical models to improve academic testing, making them more efficient, informative, and fair for students and educators.
Douglas Kinsey, an artist and professor emeritus in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, died May 21 at his home. He was 88.
Kinsey joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1968 after earning his M.F.A. at the University of Minnesota and his bachelor’s degree at Oberlin College. Before coming to Notre Dame, he taught at Oberlin, the University of North Dakota, and Berea College.…
In March 2019, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., announced that the University would provide funding to support research projects that address issues emerging from the Church sexual abuse crisis. Since that announcement, 10 grants have been administered through the Church Sexual Abuse Crisis Research Grant Program to researchers in the College of Arts and Letters, the Institute for Educational Initiatives, the Keough School of Global Affairs, the Law School, and the Mendoza College of Business.
Even after accounting for demographic variables (gender, race/ethnicity, parental educational attainment), researchers found that undergraduate students who reported greater pandemic-induced stress tended to have greater test anxiety and were less confident in their computer skills.
The Office of the Provost presented Kimberly Belcher, Ann-Marie Conrado, Blake Leyerle, Forrest Spence, and Michael Macaluso with Joyce Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and presented Maureen Dawson with a Dockweiler Award for outstanding advising.
Michel Hockx, Timothy Matovina, Jason Ruiz, and James Rudolph won grants from Notre Dame Research for their respective projects involving Foreign Office files for India, the Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P. Papers, materials documenting Native American and Catholic encounters, and advancing the cross-disciplinary user experience lab: equipment restoration and renewal for faculty and graduate level research in the Design Department.
David Ladouceur, an associate professor emeritus in the Department of Classics, died May 8 at his home. He was 73. Ladouceur joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1976 after earning his Ph.D. in classics at Brown University and his bachelor’s degree at Cornell University. He served as department chair for nine years, leading the Department of Modern Classical Languages and then the Department of Classical and Oriental Languages at a time before regional language groups were separated into their own departments.
Tobias Boes is an associate professor of German and a Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on cultural relationships between Germany and the world at large, especially during the first half of the 20th century. In this interview, he discusses his book on Thomas Mann, his research on cultural dimensions of nationalism, and why he's developed an interest in the environmental humanities.
There’s a lot at stake for the narrator of an audiobook — their ability to reflect the traits of the characters can make or break the listening experience. That’s where Siiri Scott has shined, as she’s proficient in more than 40 dialects. Her methodology for researching and designing dialects for theater, film, and voiceover work is a skill she teaches to Notre Dame students as head of acting and directing in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre and one she uses as a rising star in the world of audiobook narration.
Anna Haskins, the Andrew V. Tackes Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, was one of eight experts asked to testify at a public information-gathering session on policies and programs to reduce intergenerational poverty. The webinar, sponsored by the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, was centered on outcomes resulting from current child welfare and justice systems. Haskins is a former elementary school teacher, and much of her academic work focuses on the intersection of family and the educational and criminal justice systems and how these institutions preserve and mitigate social inequality.
Notre Dame theologian James VanderKam, a renowned scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers. VanderKam, the John A. O’Brien Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Scriptures in the Department of Theology, was among the 261 members in the newest AAAS class, which includes actor Glenn Close, novelist Salman Rushdie, painter Sam Gilliam, New York Times critic Wesley Morris, and mRNA technology pioneers Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman.
Cara Ocobock, assistant professor of anthropology, received the Human Biology Association’s 2022 Michael A. Little Early Career Award for her significant contribution to the field of human biology and the promise of more. She is the second Notre Dame anthropologist to earn the award in the last two years, after associate professor Lee Gettler won it in 2020.
Notre Dame Creative Writing Program director and poet Joyelle McSweeney has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of her creative ability in the arts and potential in future endeavors. McSweeney, who is also a playwright, novelist, translator, critic, and English professor, is in extremely good company — Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Ken Burns, Rachel Carson, and Zora Neale Hurston are previous fellows — and 19 Arts & Letters faculty have won Guggenheims in the last 22 years. “I’m still taking it in, to be honest,” she said. “It’s a spectacular show of confidence from the universe.”
Perin Gürel, a Notre Dame associate professor of American studies, has won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Research in Turkey, in support of the completion of a book on the international history of comparisons made between Turkey and Iran. Her research will detail the history of comparisons made between Turkey and Iran, but Gürel also intends to critique the intellectual valorization of comparison itself. Sharp distinctions about areas of the world are often made, she said, despite the relatively arbitrary nature of borders between countries — not to mention the ways in which subjectively comparing one thing to another permeates other aspects of life.
Located in Albania between Greece and Italy, the Roman forum at Butrint has attracted Notre Dame archaeologist David Hernandez and others for nearly 20 years. They grab pickaxes, shovels and a water pump to reveal a town plaza and emerging technologies of the time that are well-preserved because they stayed submerged underwater for centuries. An associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Classics, Hernandez is now pouring his insight into a book about the Roman forum at Butrint. Supported by a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship at Harvard University, which he was awarded this spring, the book will explore why Butrint is far more significant than scholars have previously recognized.
John T. McGreevy, a distinguished historian and former dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame, has been elected the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost of the University by its Board of Trustees, acting on the recommendation of Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., and informed by a search committee of elected and appointed faculty and students. “The Notre Dame community is fortunate to have in John a provost who is ideally suited for a position that is so central to our progress as the world’s leading Catholic university and among our nation’s most respected teaching and research institutions,” Board Chairman John J. Brennan said. “The search committee and Father Jenkins recommended to the Trustees a scholar and administrator with impeccable credentials, and we look forward to working closely with him in the years ahead.”
Joseph Blenkinsopp, the John A. O'Brien Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the University of Notre Dame, died March 26 in South Bend. He was 94. Although he retired from Notre Dame in 1999, he continued to pursue academic research until nearly the end of his life. His last book, Luke’s Jesus: Between Incarnation and Crucifixion, was published in October 2021.
Essaka Joshua, associate professor of English, has been elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, an international educational organization that promotes understanding of the human past. She earned the accolade because of her expertise in myth and folklore, but her understanding of and appreciation for the human past has transformed and significantly deepened since her introduction to disability studies, which she’s researched for the past 20 years. The evolving discipline of disability studies centers the experiences of people with physical, psychological and/or psychiatric differences who, like other oppressed groups, are marginalized because of exclusionary social structures and prejudices.
John Deak, a Notre Dame associate professor of history, has won a collaborative research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for an ambitious research project that seeks to reshape perspectives on how and why the Habsburg Empire collapsed after World War I. Partnering with historian Jonathan Gumz of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, Deak’s three-year grant will support significant archival work across Europe as the scholars explore how the wartime imposition of martial law crushed local political authority and ultimately wiped a 600-year empire off the map.
“The picture that emerged at the end of both of these visits is the immense effort that Muslims put into integrating into the local population, while simultaneously preserving their faithfulness to the Muslim way of life and the Muslim faith," said Emilia Justyna Powell, associate professor of political science.
With support from two major research grants, Notre Dame associate professor of philosophy Nicholas Teh has been exploring new ideas in symmetry for philosophy and physics. The project is the latest in Teh’s efforts to pursue research at the intersection of science, philosophy, and mathematics. He’s particularly interested in applying philosophical principles to the work of scientists and engineers, offering conclusions and insights that can help them improve their understanding of the foundations of their research.
For centuries, the official history of Ireland was held in British archives, and the unfiltered Irish perspective was lost — except in its poetry and folk songs. For that reason, among others, poetry holds a higher status in Irish culture than in many other countries, said Brian Ó Conchubhair, an associate professor of Irish language and literature. Ó Conchubhair and co-editor Samuel Fisher are bringing that history to a wider audience on St. Patrick's Day in the most comprehensive collection of Irish poetry to date, Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern.
On the pages of her novels, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi creates female characters who insist on being themselves. That’s something the award-winning writer and Notre Dame faculty member knows quite a bit about. Growing up in Iran — a country where laws restricted her mobility because of her gender — she loved marching by herself through a deep eucalyptus forest to go to the beach on the Caspian Sea. “I have a very adventurous spirit,” said Van der Vliet Oloomi, an associate professor of English and the MFA in Creative Writing Program. “I write female characters who are equally themselves. They insist on being who they are in the world.”
In his latest published work, Gabriel Said Reynolds explores the paradox of divine mercy and divine vengeance—a puzzle with which scholars have long wrestled. The project, Allah: God in the Qur’an, (Yale University Press, 2020), enabled him to engage with the Bible, the Qur’an, and Muslim-Christian relations in ways that reach both fellow scholars and a broader audience. “It's an engaged reading of a text from a curious outsider who brings to the table some knowledge of the biblical subtext of the Qur’an,” said Reynolds, the Jerome J. Crowley and Rosaleen G. Crowley Professor of Theology. “I’m not the first to notice this, obviously—it’s a big issue in the Bible as well—but it comes to the fore in the Qur’an.”
James Rudolph’s creative exercises can be measured in movement — from surgical robots making precise actions while replacing knees and hips to a handheld device that determines whether cancer treatment is working without breaking the skin. In his work, the Notre Dame assistant professor of industrial design is focused on discovering important problems in order to create a better future, a mindset he maintains in the classroom, where his students are designing everything from marketable products to physical environments to artistic experiences.
Notre Dame historian Ian Ona Johnson received significant recognition this month for his influential research on military history — including an award honoring his first book and a research grant supporting work on his next book. The P.J. Moran Family Assistant Professor of Military History has won the Society for Military History’s 2022 Distinguished Book Award for best first book, Faustian Bargain: Secret Soviet-German Military Cooperation in the Interwar Period, and he will write his next book, tentatively titled Armies of Peace: The United Nations, NATO, and the Korean War with significant support from the Truman Library Institute, which this month honored him with the 2022 Scholar’s Award.
Notre Dame’s College of Arts & Letters is launching a new selective program that will offer specialized coursework, programming, and resources for undergraduates interested in finding deeper meaning in the practice of business through the liberal arts. The Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise & Society is a rigorous academic experience and collaborative community focused on helping students form strong bonds as they engage in exclusive classes, independent research, meaningful dialogue, and purpose-driven career discernment. The cohort-based program is open to Arts & Letters students with a minor in business economics or a Mendoza College of Business minor, or Mendoza majors who have a major, supplemental major, or minor in Arts & Letters.