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Five years ago, on a frigid January morning, a nearly indescribable journey began for four young women from Nigeria. They came to Notre Dame after being carefully selected by their government, shepherded by senior leaders from the United Nations and the Catholic Church, and anxiously but quietly awaited by a tight circle of supporters on campus.

For a country torn apart by religious violence and where the value of educating girls was constantly questioned, sending this group to a Catholic university on an unfamiliar continent was a gamble, but a risk many felt was worth taking. There were two Christians who had been kidnapped by Muslim terrorists as schoolgirls and endured a harrowing path back to freedom. And there were two Muslims who had encountered devastating violence at the hands of Christians.

They arrived with the chance to pursue an education that could transform their lives, but also, their country hoped, be an example that could help heal their homeland. Maybe, just maybe, if this quartet could go to America and thrive, they could demonstrate all that is possible when strength is built through knowledge and community is founded on forgiveness.

“The symbolism of this was breathtaking,” said Sara Sievers, a former Notre Dame faculty member who served as a host mother to all four. “They had lost all you really can, short of their own lives. But if they could learn to love one another as sisters, then anyone can.”

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In this video, which debuted at the Arts & Letters Diploma Ceremony, seven members of the Class of 2023 look back on how their time studying the liberal arts helped them develop as scholars and as people.

Connor Tsikitas, for example, knew growing up that he wanted to attend Notre Dame. And when he realized his dream, the political science major made the most of it, also exploring anthropology, gender studies, and languages.

“I think I've become a more understanding person and more open in terms of understanding people's perspectives and different backgrounds,” he said.

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Someone once remarked to Emma Ackerley that her college transcript was all over the map. The anthropology major, who has a supplementary major in global affairs (with a concentration in transnational European studies), and a minor in journalism, ethics, and democracy — takes that as a compliment. And wherever she ends up on the map in the future, there’s a good chance she’ll be able to communicate with locals when she arrives. She’s fluent in Italian, reads and speaks Portuguese and French, can read Spanish, and took a semester of Russian just for the chance to explore yet another language.

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Growing up, Grace Gasper sometimes felt like everybody else was playing a game for which she didn’t have the rules. When she discovered the 1905 novel A Little Princess in third grade, it became a continuous source of comfort and encouragement. At Notre Dame, when the time came to do a senior thesis project, Gasper was eager to do a stage adaptation of her favorite book that re-examined its protagonist through a neurodivergent lens, drawing inspiration from her own childhood experiences. 

“My hope in creating this piece,” Gasper said, “was to show Sara’s differences not as obstacles to overcome, but as beautiful, integral parts of who she is.”

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The Graduate School is honoring the following people from the College of Arts and Letters Arts: Robert Goulding with the Dick and Peggy Notebaert Award; Susanna De Stradis with the Shaheen Award in the Humanities; Luiz Vilaça with the Shaheen Award in the Social Sciences; and Ester E. Aguirre Alfaro with the Social Justice Award.

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“Jay Dolan’s pathbreaking mix of social and religious history marked a turn of direction for both fields,” said John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost and Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History. “The same commitment to the lives of ordinary people marked many of his initiatives as the founding director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, long the country’s premier center for such scholarship. He inspired young scholars, mentored colleagues (very much including myself), and educated generations of lucky Notre Dame undergraduates and graduate students. All of us at Notre Dame were lucky to have him in our midst, and we will all mourn his death.”

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Coste, who compiled a 3.972 grade point average, has been a member of the Dean’s List every semester. As an undergraduate research assistant, the AnBryce Scholar and QuestBridge Scholar studied Indiana schools’ responses to COVID-19. He also studied for a semester in Ireland at Trinity College Dublin. Coste plans to work as a technical solutions engineer for Epic Systems in Madison, Wisconsin.

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The first time Michael Schreffler visited the Peruvian city of Cuzco, he noticed the architectural legacy of the Inca civilization still standing next to buildings that represent the European Baroque style. The visual contrast tells part of the story of Spanish colonization — and Schreffler’s exploration of that story in his 2020 book, Cuzco: Incas, Spaniards, and the Making of a Colonial City, has now won the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.

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Sarah Edmands Martin, an assistant professor of visual communication design, has been named a 2024 Fulbright Scholar and will use the award to design an interactive digital folktale at the University of Bergen in Norway. Her project seeks to “digitally entangle” ancient buried folklore, computer learning, and Bergen storytelling techniques. Martin will design the tale — with illustrations, photography, and typography — after analyzing recurring motifs and ideas within archival folklore and collected contemporary stories.

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The researchers said their findings point to the complexity of contemporary teens’ college-related attitudes in the wake of the “prison boom,” the era of mass incarceration in the United States between 1970 and 2010. This 40-year period has resulted in nearly half of Americans reporting that they have had an immediate family member in prison or jail, including more than 2 million children who currently have an incarcerated parent and 10 million children who have had a parent imprisoned at some point in their lives. 

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Increasing minimum payments for writers alone “won’t resolve the underlying issues” that motivated WGA members to approve the strike authorization, Becker said. If negotiations do break down after May 1, she said “deep-seated infrastructural issues” will be the cause. “A strike is therefore highly likely due to the significance of this situation for the industry’s future. The only real uncertainty is over how long the strike will last and what the long-term fallout could be."

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The numbers alone are remarkable.

Notre Dame psychologist E. Mark Cummings has secured $40 million in grant funding to conduct ground-breaking research. He’s produced 366 publications — including 13 books, 279 journal articles, and 58 chapters in scholarly volumes. Other scholars have cited his findings more than 50,000 times.

In honor of his long track record of accomplishments as a scholar, the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Professor of Psychology has been named the inaugural winner of the College of Arts & Letters Research Achievement Award. 

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Jean Porter finds it difficult to describe her approach to mentoring graduate students, because it changes with each and every one. As a mentor, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology has been described as providing candid and clarifying advice while also offering patience, support, and generosity. She has guided and encouraged 28 doctoral students as they finished their dissertations, then written recommendation letters for them and given further advice as they launched their own careers. 

“It’s just about forming a personal relationship with the student,” Porter said. “In my experience, there’s no substitute for that.”

In recognition of the time and attention she has dedicated to her students, helping them grow intellectually and find their scholarly voices, Porter has been selected as the inaugural winner of the College of Arts & Letters Graduate Student Mentorship Award.

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"We think homelessness is bad — but what about homelessness when there’s 5 inches of rain in one day? Or when it’s 108 degrees out? It exacerbates every problem," said Roy Scranton, the associate professor of English, director of the Creative Writing Program, and founding director of the University’s Environmental Humanities Initiative. "And if we don’t start thinking about it now, in forward-looking, adaptive ways, it’s going to be unmanageable. We need to be thinking now about how to live ethically in a world of catastrophe."

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American studies and history professor Kathleen Sprows Cummings, who has led the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism for the past 11 years, will step down from the position in June, with Notre Dame historian Darren Dochuk and theologian David Lantigua becoming co-directors. Cummings, the Rev. John A. O'Brien College Professor of History, has been associated with the center for nearly 30 years, starting when she arrived at the University as a doctoral student in history.

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Heather Reynolds’ testimony will emphasize the importance of building evidence around programs that support SNAP recipients so they can both feed their families and live a life outside of poverty. “As we think about the farm bill, we need to be less focused on just work requirements and more focused on evidence-based reform that will give people a way out of poverty,” she said. “Our solution must be to give them programs that work toward upward mobility.”

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Junior Kaylee Kern took Theories of Media and Technology in the spring of her sophomore year, and she credits the course for changing how she consumes and understands all forms of media, from books to movies to memes. An English major with a minor in Irish language and literature, Kern enjoyed how the seminar-style class encouraged students from different academic disciplines to tackle various types of media properly by approaching course material from a diverse set of perspectives. For the final paper, which was wide open to creative interpretation, she researched and analyzed the history and nature of lists — and wrote it entirely in the form of a list.

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Director of musical theater Matt Hawkins wants to reimagine the way new musicals are brought to the public. Thanks to a grant from Notre Dame Research, Hawkins is collaborating with alumnus Jorge “Jay” Rivera-Herrans ’20 to do just that. The pair’s new musical, My Heart Says Go,” premieres at the South Bend Civic Theatre after the pair produced a studio cast recording as a way to generate interest and awareness. That model is also proving successful for Rivera-Herrans with another musical he’s written, EPIC: The Troy Saga, which began as his senior thesis at Notre Dame and has now become a viral sensation with more than 70 million views on TikTok and debuting as the No. 4 album on iTunes the day of its release.

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A partner of undergraduate career services but not another career center, the College of Arts & Letters' Beyond the Dome program functions a mechanism to “de-stress” the career development process for students, said career program manager Jared Mrozinske. Students come in with “incredibly thoughtful reasons” for picking their major, he said, but over the course of four years, pressure stacks up — self-pressure, peer-pressure, family-pressure and student loan debt — and students feels pushed to just get a job. “We empower Arts and Letters students to understand the inherent skills that they have and how to break into whatever career path they want with those skills,” he said. 

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In just the past year, Notre Dame junior Jasmine Mitchell has studied in Dublin, London, and Washington, D.C. In each location she’s traveled to, Mitchell has studied how localities are addressing affordable housing, and she hopes to eventually bring innovative solutions back to urban communities in the United States. Because no matter how far her travels have taken her, she’s never lost sight of the problems facing her home community of Atlanta. By using her diverse academic interests — American studies, business economics, and public policy — to study this pressing issue, she’s striving to make the difference that others have failed to.

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Dianne Pinderhughes, a Presidential Faculty Fellow and the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, has been named the Eleanor Roosevelt Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS) for the 2023 academic year. She was recognized for her work as a political scientist whose research addresses inequality with a focus on ethnic, racial and gender politics in the Americas, and for her efforts to explore the creation of American institutions of civil society in the 20th century and their influence on the formation of voting rights policy. 

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Since Kendra Lyimo was a child, her father has regularly traveled to his native Tanzania and returned with beaded necklaces, carved figurines and other items of sentimental and cultural value, fostering a lifelong interest in East African art and identity for the Notre Dame junior. Now, the art history major will have the opportunity to pursue her passion for art and art history even further as a Beinecke Scholar, focused on her goal of advancing scholarship around and expanding access to East African art and its ideas.

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Fewer Americans have identified as a member of a religion over the last 30 years, and Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith is working to explain why. With the help of five undergraduates and one graduate student, this research is the centerpiece of a first-of-its-kind class at the University’s Rome Global Gateway that is culminating with a two-day symposium in April with Vatican officials and European scholars. It's supported by the inaugural year of the Rome Fellows Program, a College of Arts & Letters initiative designed to pair intense undergraduate research experience with an ongoing question a faculty member is interested in exploring further.

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Jason Carley ’10 started his career as an industrial designer for a client roster of corporate heavyweights, and he helped make a personal-security device that won investor support on the TV show Shark Tank. But three years ago, his focus shifted to environmental impact and making products that are a step up from sustainable. That drew him back to Notre Dame, where he's earning an MFA in industrial design and developing new products with unconventional materials, including a chair made from plants and other natural resources.

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The Michael L. Smith Managing Director of the University of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) was invited as an expert on poverty to speak from her experience in both the service provider and research spaces. LEO works with service providers nationwide to build rigorous evidence for programs designed to move people permanently out of poverty. 

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Notre Dame students wanting to prepare for medical school while simultaneously majoring in an additional area of interest — from Africana studies to theology — have an extraordinary option: the Arts & Letters pre-health supplementary major. A&L pre-health supplementary majors take all the prerequisite courses to prepare for medical school or a career in other health professions — including Organic Chemistry, Physics and Calculus — while still having flexibility in their schedules to delve into other academic areas that intrigue them.

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In his Hormones, Health, and Human Behavior Laboratory inside Corbett Family Hall, Lee Gettler has freezers full of saliva samples (as well as fingernail clippings) from people from around the world. By studying the chemical composition of these specimens, the associate professor of anthropology has developed several groundbreaking studies that have focused attention on — and reframed perspectives about — fatherhood. Gettler has focused on testosterone levels in men — in places as nearby as South Bend and locations as far away as the Philippines and the Republic of the Congo — and how those levels change (or don’t change) as they grow, age, and become fathers. His goal is to examine and share the diverse ways that fathers and families around the world raise children, and to support the wide range of approaches to bringing up healthy youth.

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Zach Sell’s book Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital has won the 2022 Paul E. Lovejoy Prize from the Journal of Global Slavery for its excellence and originality in a major work related to global slavery. The panel of judges unanimously awarded the prize to the assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Africana Studies, describing the book on how slavery's influence survived emancipation and still infuses empire and capitalism as meticulously researched and beautifully written.

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Julia McKenna is still a Notre Dame undergraduate student, but you could easily mistake her for a professional scholar, given how much research she’s conducted. Research has been a hallmark of her Notre Dame career, though somewhat organically — year after year, she followed her academic passions, and research became a key part of every one. With six research experiences under her belt, she’s found it’s taught her independence and self-sufficiency, how to ask strong questions, and what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

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This year’s distinguished cohort of Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America includes Peter Jeffery, director of Sacred Music at Notre Dame, professor of musicology and ethnomusicology, and the Michael P. Grace Chair in Medieval Studies. A small group of medievalists is elected to this honor each year, to recognize “major long-term scholarly achievement within the field of Medieval Studies.”

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