Beginning Monday (Jan. 16), the University of Notre Dame will host a series of events to mark both Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Walk the Walk Week. The observances celebrate the diversity that currently exists on the University’s campus and offer an opportunity to reflect on how each member of the campus community can take an active role in making the University more welcoming and inclusive.
Therese Cory, an assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Philosophy, is analyzing theories crafted hundreds of years ago about how people interact with their surroundings. She wants to understand more about the original theories and whether they’ve been interpreted correctly over time. Recently, Cory wrote an essay based on her research that won the American Catholic Philosophical Association’s Rising Scholar Award.
Laura Knoppers, a professor in Notre Dame’s Department of English, has been named the Honored Scholar of the Year for 2016 by the Milton Society of America. Recognizing lifetime achievement in the field of Milton studies, the award places Knoppers among an elite group of the world’s top Miltonists.
Notre Dame’s rapidly growing Department of Economics has added six new faculty members who bring diverse expertise in political economy, econometrics, labor mobility, market design, urban geography and poverty, and international finance. Lakshmi Iyer, Marinho Bertanha, Nilesh Fernando, Michèle Müller-Itten, David Phillips, and César Sosa-Padilla join the ranks of a vibrant department that has added more than a dozen faculty members in the last four years and offers one of the University’s largest undergraduate majors.
Three Notre Dame faculty members—Associate Professors Darren Dochuk, Karen Graubart, and Sean Kelsey—were offered fellowships last week from the National Endowment for the Humanities, continuing the University’s record success winning support for humanities research. Arts and Letters faculty have won 61 NEH fellowships since 1999—more than any other private university in the country.
History is often viewed through the lens of social movements, political trends, or intellectual advances. But for Korey Garibaldi, there are also important insights to be found in more fleeting elements of American culture—like briefly popular texts from the 20th-century publishing industry.
Timothy Matovina, co-director of the Institute for Latino Studies and professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, has been selected to receive the 2016 Richard Cardinal Cushing Medal for the Advancement of Church Research. The Cushing Medal is intended to recognize the work of Church leaders, who, like Cardinal Cushing, have demonstrated a commitment to the advancement of the Catholic Church’s needs through research.
César Sosa-Padilla, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded the 2016 John Charles Polanyi Prize by the government of the Province of Ontario. The annual prize recognizes up to five outstanding, early career researchers in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, or economic science.
“When you look at which men and women U.S. Catholics have wanted to become saints, you actually learn a lot about how they understood themselves, not only as Catholics but also as members of American society. ”
— Kathleen Sprows Cummings
A new study from Nathan Rose, assistant professor of psychology, examined a fundamental problem your brain has to solve, which is keeping information “in mind,” or active, so your brain can act accordingly.
Stephen Lancaster, an associate professor of the practice in voice in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Music and Sacred Music at Notre Dame program, has been awarded the 2016 American Prize in Vocal Performance. Lancaster, who is also head of the graduate studio in voice, won the prize for the men in art song and oratorio, professional division.
On a sunny spring afternoon, Amy Mulligan leads a class of Notre Dame undergraduates to the shore of Saint Mary’s Lake. Sitting on the grass, the students take turns reading aloud passages from a 12th-century Irish text. “We make these campus pilgrimages to consider how a text is transformed when you move into a natural environment,” said Mulligan, an assistant professor of Irish language and literature who recently won both a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award.
Joseph Kaboski’s work in Armenia started with an email from the developing country, one of those you might usually delete. But the Notre Dame economist responded—and he’s now become a trusted adviser to the Central Bank of Armenia, helping with research to guide the Eurasian nation’s economic policy.
Meghan Sullivan, the Rev. John A. O'Brien Collegiate Associate Professor of Philosophy, discusses her current research on the philosophy of time—especially time biases, or how our assumptions about time factor into our preferences about how our lives go.
A unique collaboration between the Notre Dame Children’s Choir and a Sacred Music at Notre Dame graduate student aims to invigorate ancient pieces of music and make them more accessible and enjoyable for modern audiences. Released by the Dynamic Catholic Institute, O Emmanuel is already attracting attention, debuting this week at No. 1 on Billboard’s traditional classical albums chart and No. 3 on the classical albums chart. A review in Catholic World Report described it as “the best jazz infusion into contemporary Christmas music since Charlie Brown’s Christmas.”
Notre Dame researchers suggest that the origin of both colic and SIDS may be related to the gradual emergence of an infant’s ability to voluntarily control the release of air through the vocal track.
The public has lots of questions about refugees, and William Evans and Danny Fitzgerald have come up with some answers. Evans, chair and Keough-Hesburgh Professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Economics, and Fitzgerald, a senior economics and mathematics major, have been analyzing a quarter-century of data to determine the economic impact of refugees who enter the United States. They will present their findings to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday (Nov. 15).
While universality—and unity amid diversity—is a fundamental characteristic of Roman Catholicism, all-too-familiar issues related to gender, sexuality, race, and authority have wrought the church with internal conflict and no clear path to finding middle ground. A new book, co-edited by Mary Ellen Konieczny, intends to start the conversation about the polarization in the Catholic Church through healthy debates and genuine engagement.
A new book by Notre Dame Sociologist Terence McDonnell examines why expensive media campaigns that try to harness the power of culture to change beliefs or behavior often fail. Using AIDS campaigns in Ghana as his central case study, he lays out an argument that carries important implications for diverse types of media campaigns around the world.
The Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame conducts impactful research using the best available theoretical and empirical methods in the discipline, all while fostering the Catholic mission of the University. With specialties in macroeconomics, applied micro economics, development economics, and game theory, Notre Dame economics faculty and graduate students work together to find answers to a wide array of difficult economic, social, and policy-relevant questions. In this new video, Notre Dame economists talk about some of the department’s pioneering research projects and its approach to graduate education and faculty development.
Karen Graubart loves a good puzzle. In a Peruvian archive this summer, the Notre Dame associate professor of history and Romance languages and literatures found a piece of a puzzle that reshaped how many scholars view colonial Latin American rule. Her research discovery supports arguments she recently made in her article in Hispanic American Historical Review, which won the Conference on Latin American History’s 2015 James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize.
Presentations by University faculty and researchers, Mass, a service project, a 5K run/walk and marching band performances are planned leading up to kickoff at the Alamodome.
James Sullivan, co-founder of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Development and Rev. Thomas J. McDonagh, C.S.C., Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, will testify Nov. 4 in Washington, D.C.
The Qur’an describes God as a god of mercy. The Qur’an describes God as a god of vengeance. Are those qualities mutually exclusive? Gabriel Said Reynolds doesn’t think so. The Notre Dame professor of Islamic studies and theology is using a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to explore the idea. He’s spending a year researching the way the Muslim holy text juxtaposes narratives of God’s destruction with declarations of God’s compassion.
David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests include American politics, civic engagement, political behavior, religion and politics, and education policy. In this video, he discusses his research on why people do—or, increasingly do not—get involved in politics.
Marisel Moreno, an associate professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, has been selected to receive the 2016 Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor in the College of Arts and Letters. Moreno, whose research and teaching focus on Latino literature and culture, helped launch a community-based learning program in her department in 2010. Students in her classes enhance traditional literature study by volunteering at La Casa de Amistad, a local Latino community organization.
French literature has received a lot of attention lately from an unexpected source—economists. Julia Douthwaite, a professor of French in Notre Dame’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, wants to evaluate their interpretations and delve deeper into literary representations of money. Douthwaite has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities—her second—for her book project on the topic, tentatively titled Financiers We Have Known: A Capitalist History of Literature.
Sociologist Kraig Beyerlein and his team used hypernetwork sampling to create a catalog of protest events that occurred throughout the United States between the summer of 2010 and the summer of 2011.
An interdisciplinary research collaboration between the University of Notre Dame and Cornell University has awarded more than $344,000 to seven projects in the final year of the program that explores the theoretical, empirical, and practical dimensions of hope and optimism, as well as related states such as pessimism, anxiety, and despair. The project, Hope and Optimism: Conceptual and Empirical Investigations, also announced the winners of its Hope on Stage and Hope on Screen contests, which challenged artists to create both original plays and original films that explored the concept of hope.
The University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies will convene a gathering of theologians and other scholars in Havana Oct. 16-18 to discuss the impact of Pope Francis’ visits to Latin America and the United States. The colloquium, to be held in the Casa Sacerdotal (Priests’ House) of the Archdiocese of Havana, will include participants from throughout Latin America and the United States — among them, a group of Notre Dame undergraduate students enrolled in one of the institute’s theology courses.