1916 The Irish Rebellion was awarded "Best Documentary Series" at the 2016 Irish Film and Television Award ceremony, held on Friday, Oct. 7, in Dublin. Narrated by Liam Neeson, the three-part series tells the dramatic story of the events that took place in Dublin during Easter Week 1916, when a small group of Irish rebels took on the might of the British Empire.
The University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters has launched two rigorous new doctoral programs in Italian and Spanish designed to train world-class literary scholars in the languages and literatures of Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and Latin America. As the first new graduate degrees formed since the creation of the College’s innovative 5+1 Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, the curriculum and structure has been designed to incentivize and facilitate timely degree completion.
Edward “Ted” Beatty, professor of history, associate dean for academic affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs, and faculty fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, has been selected as the winner of the 2016 Friedrich Katz Prize for his book Technology and the Search for Progress in Modern Mexico (University of California Press, 2015). The Katz Prize is awarded annually by the American Historical Association (AHA) to honor the best book in Latin American and Caribbean history.
Robert Goulding, an associate professor in Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science program, has won a yearlong fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he will finish a book on Renaissance thinker Thomas Harriot. About 200 scholars from around the world are chosen each year to work with 28 permanent faculty at the IAS.
Notre Dame Research has embarked on an initiative this academic year to identify the infrastructure support needs for social scientists across campus and to find approaches to fill those needs. Information gathering has begun and Vice President for Research Robert Bernhard welcomes the thoughts of faculty and students about how the University can advance its social sciences programs of research and scholarship.
Notre Dame’s Department of History adds three new faculty members this fall, strengthening its scholarship in 19th century American history, 20th century American history, and 18th and 19th century French history. Katie Jarvis and Emily Remus join the department as assistant professors, while James “Jake” Lundberg will be director of undergraduate studies.
More than $650,000 has been awarded to 15 projects in the second year of a research collaboration aimed at building new understanding about how religious and transformative experiences occur and shape lives. The Experience Project, a $5.1 million project supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, aims to answer questions about how religious experiences affect a person’s concept of God; how transformative experiences can affect a person’s identity, values, belief system and behaviors; and how religious and other types of transformative experiences differ.
From the first flicker of life in Frankenstein’s monster to the spark of unexpected connection between two high school students, the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre’s 2016-17 theatre season features an array of diverse, compelling productions. The department will present two student-written plays, In Paradisum and The Pink Pope, followed by an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lauren Gunderson’s I and You, and Christ’s Passion: Medieval Mystery Plays.
Patrick Griffin, the Madden-Hennebry Professor of History and chair of Notre Dame’s Department of History, has been elected to the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture. Founded in 1943 at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, the Institute supports research on the history and cultures of North America from 1450 to 1820.
Two faculty members and former chairs who were instrumental in the development of the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre are taking their final bows. Mark Pilkinton, who expanded the department in the 1980s and pushed for the building of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, retired this summer. Donald Crafton unified the department during his tenure as chair and expanded it to include film and television studies. He will retire after the fall semester.
the London Global Gateway hosted the fourth annual Global Dome Exchange Program, an intensive seminar designed to accelerate dissertation progress and build international networks of young scholars in the humanities. The program facilitated conversations between 15 graduate students and 18 guest faculty—with diverse interests spanning literature and history—from the University of Notre Dame, University of Oxford, King’s College London, and University of Edinburgh.
The University of Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art presents Raising Children for Strangers, featuring the latest work of the Brooklyn-based, Taiwanese-American artist Fay Ku. The special exhibition is a collaboration between the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Liu Institute of Asia and Asian Studies, and the Snite Museum. The seven pieces featured in the exhibit are hybrid works of art that, to use the artist’s own words, “adopt visual tropes from both Western art and found images from social media to create tableaux that are open-ended narratives.”
How people react to stress–both psychologically and physically–can have implications for a person’s health and well-being, including how well they age. Professor of Psychology and Associate Vice President for Research Cindy Bergeman is conducting a 10-year study based on how different people respond to stress, why they react the way they do, and the different ways people cope.
James Sullivan, Rev. Thomas J. McDonagh, C.S.C., Associate Professor of Economics and co-founder of the Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities at the University of Notre Dame, will participate in a briefing to Congressional members, staff and other key stakeholders on Thursday (Sept. 15) about the impact of emergency assistance on homelessness.
In his new book, American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton University Press), McGreevy uses individual religious experiences and others as a gateway to a larger narrative. The book traces how the religious order grew from 600 men in 1814 to roughly 17,000 men a century later. McGreevy argues that their odyssey of expulsion (by European nationalists worried about excessive Jesuit loyalty to the papacy) and reconstruction (as Jesuits launched a counterculture centered around parishes, schools, and universities) powerfully shaped modern history.
Matthew Payne will join Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television and Theatre (FTT) as an assistant professor this fall, bringing research and teaching interests that range from the rapidly evolving field of video games and interactive entertainment to convergent media, new media literacy, media representations of war, and ethnographic audience research. His book, Playing War: Military Video Games After 9/11, examines how games like the Call of Duty and Battlefield series “transform international strife into interactive fun."
“When we think about paramilitarism, we tend to think about a rather contemporary history around counterinsurgency warfare, but that moment is actually linked to a much longer history that goes back to the very formation of modern American states,” said Joshua Lund, associate professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame. Lund studies Latin American film, literature, and cultural politics. His published works include two books, The Mestizo State (2012) and The Impure Imagination (2006), a co-edited volume of scholarship on Gilberto Freyre, and essays on a range of cultural topics.
The University of Notre Dame has received $128 million in research funding for fiscal year 2016 — the second highest in its history. In fiscal year 2015, the University’s research funding was its highest of all time, reaching $133 million.
“The research, scholarship and creativity of Notre Dame faculty continues to make a difference in multiple ways across our country and around the world,” said Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., the University’s president. “The growth in external funding is a tangible testimony to the importance of their work.”
The seventh annual “Saturdays with the Saints” lecture series sponsored by the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame will feature seven saints whose lives give witness to the mercy of God.
Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., president of the University of Notre Dame from 1952 to 1987, was one of the nation’s most influential figures in higher education and national affairs and a well-known figure on campus. In the 1960s, a student named Robert Schmuhl, covering what Father Hesburgh called “the student revolution” for the Associated Press, began what would be a lifelong relationship with the president. Schmuhl, now the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Chair in American Studies and Journalism at Notre Dame, is the author of Fifty Years with Father Hesburgh: On and Off the Record, released Aug. 25 by University of Notre Dame Press.
When the Wauja people tell a story about their history and culture, the words they choose convey a deep meaning about the indigenous Brazilian tribe’s interconnectedness to its landscape. Christopher Ball wants to delve into that relationship between language and place. Funded by an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, the assistant professor of anthropology is exploring how the Wauja people use words to create an identity that ties their culture to a nearby river and chronicling that meaning for future generations.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton studies medieval texts, many of them on sheepskins and fragile after hundreds of years in conditions not always suited for preservation. The Notre Dame Professor of English studies the margins of these medieval texts, which contain thoughts scrawled by some of the brightest minds of the time. They are a layer of interaction and understanding that Kerby-Fulton will spend the next year studying, supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Marcio Bahia is coming to Notre Dame’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures with his eyes focused squarely on Brazil. A scholar of Brazilian culture and language, Bahia will join the College of Arts and Letters faculty this fall with a focus on accelerating the growth of the Portuguese program.
Rev. Marvin R. O’Connell, professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre Dame, died early Friday morning, August 19, at Dujarie House in Holy Cross Village. He was 86.
A study of the Homelessness Prevention Call Center in Chicago by the Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities found that such hotlines have a considerable effect on people facing homelessness, and that emergency financial assistance successfully prevents homelessness — if funding is available. The study, published in the Aug. 12 edition of Science, examines the impact of financial assistance for 4,500 individuals and families who called the HPCC between 2010 and 2012.
Thomas E. Burman, an esteemed scholar of medieval Christianity and Islam, has been named the Robert Conway Director of the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. Burman, currently a professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will begin his new role in January 2017.
Peter Casarella, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame and interim director of Latin American/North American Church Concerns (LANACC), is a scholar of Latino theology. Before joining the Notre Dame faculty in 2013, he served as professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University where he was director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology. In an interview, he discusses his research, Pope Francis, and the future of Latin American/North American Church Concerns, of which he is interim director.
Tamara Kay, a scholar with extensive experience in Latin America and Africa, will join the new Keough School of Global Affairs as associate professor of global affairs, according to Scott Appleby, Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School. Kay will hold a joint appointment in the Notre Dame Department of Sociology.
The three-volume memoir of the University of Notre Dame’s president emeritus, Rev. Edward A.“Monk” Malloy, C.S.C., will be completed next month with the publication of Monk’s Tale: The Presidential Years: 1987-2005 by the University of Notre Dame Press.
A member of the University of Notre Dame political science faculty since 2012, Patrick Deneen is the David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies. He teaches and writes about the history of political thought, American political thought, religion and politics, and literature and politics. Books he has published on these subjects include The Odyssey of Political Theory, Democratic Faith, Democracy’s Literature, The Democratic Soul, and Redeeming Democracy in America.