Jean Porter, John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, has been named a Catholic Press Association Book Award winner for 2011. Porter’s Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theology of Legal Authority, won third place in the association’s contest for best theology book of the year.
Stephanie Sluka Brauer ’97 helps house families in 18 countries as the resource development manager for Habitat for Humanity International’s Africa and Middle East regional office. Brauer, who majored in anthropology and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, now lives and works in Pretoria, South Africa.
Walking through O’Shaughnessy Hall near the end of her first semester at Notre Dame, Kristina Hamilton saw a flyer advertising the University’s Irish language courses. “I had an open class for the spring,” she says, “and I figured, ‘Why not?’”
Heath Carter, a graduate student in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of History, has been awarded a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for his work on the intersection of American religious and working-class history in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Christine Becker, an associate professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, has received the 2011 Michael Nelson Prize from the International Association for Media and History for her book It’s the Pictures that Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950’s Television.
Campus Compact, a coalition of more than 1,100 college and university presidents, has named Stuart Greene, an Institute for Educational Initiatives fellow and director of the Education, Schooling, and Society (ESS) program at the University of Notre Dame, one of four finalists for the 2011 Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award.
Notre Dame Junior Daniel Harper didn’t just want to study French—he sought to push himself out of his comfort zone and truly experience the country’s language and culture.
The Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival (NDSF) will present Pericles by William Shakespeare as part of the 2011 International Youth Arts Festival from July 3 through 11, 2011. Directed by NDSF Ryan Producing Artistic Director Jay Paul Skelton, the production features an international cast and crew that includes two students from the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre.
Some of the world’s leading scholars across a variety of relevant disciplines are visiting the University of Notre Dame for a week-long “Workshop on Adult and Non-embryonic Stem Cell Research,” being held on campus through July 2.
Morgan Iddings expected some culture shock when she traveled from Notre Dame to Moscow for an intensive Russian language immersion. The first-year Russian student faced an added challenge when she realized her host mother didn’t speak a word of English. “Nevertheless, I ended up having a great experience,” Iddings says.
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling on the sale of violent video games to minors may have been a victory for free speech, but raises an important issue: Do violent video games really harm kids? Absolutely, according to Darcia Narvaez, a University of Notre Dame psychology professor who researches the effect of violent video games on the developing brains of children and teens.
The University of Notre Dame’s Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning and Graduate School are pleased to announce the 2010-2011 Kaneb Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award winners, including 31 from the College of Arts and Letters.
As if to illustrate the truth of the biblical adage that a prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón, an internationally prominent champion of human rights, was recently suspended from his nation’s high court for abuse of judicial authority. Observations on the case are part of an essay which appears in Unearthing Franco’s Legacy, recently published by the University of Notre Dame Press and co-edited by Spanish Professor Carlos Jerez-Farrán.
People are more likely to die on or shortly after they’re paid, according to a new study by University of Notre Dame economist William Evans. Traffic fatalities, heart attacks, and increased substance abuse are among the most common causes of the short-term—but significant—increase in mortality following payday.
After being apprehended by the Chinese government and detained for more than two months on charges of tax evasion, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has been released. “I suspect that the condition of Ai’s diabetes, his resistance to confession, intense and embarrassing international pressure from capitalist and political institutions, as well as an ongoing struggle within the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party itself, all have contributed to this development,” says Lionel Jensen, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Department of History at the University of Notre Dame.
When Notre Dame political science major Jee Seun Choi wanted to understand Taiwanese national identity, she didn’t just go to the Hesburgh library on campus. Instead, she applied for a Summer Language Abroad (SLA) grant so she could absorb the island’s language and culture firsthand.
In the midst of Greece’s first financial collapse that shook the European Union one year ago, University of Notre Dame political scientist Sebastian Rosato predicted then that the financial crisis was only a symptom of a much deeper issue.
The University of Notre Dame’s Division of Student Affairs recently recognized six students with leadership awards. Five were students in the College of Arts and Letters.
Raised in a predominantly Spanish-speaking Miami community, Notre Dame senior Carolyn Caballero says she knows that daily interactions with native speakers are the key to truly understanding a new language. “You can’t take four years of Spanish and think you know it,” she says. “You have to experience dialect, questions coming out of left field, and thick accents.”
Two Notre Dame political science and peace studies undergraduates recently spent a week in New York City interacting with United Nations ambassadors and Vatican officials during an intensive seminar for college students sponsored by the Path to Peace Foundation.
A summer of intensive language training in Paris taught Notre Dame senior Anna Porto lessons that years of traditional schoolwork never could. “I studied French for six years,” says the political science major. “When I got to France, I figured out how little I really knew.”
A new book by Pope Benedict XVI highlights Notre Dame biblical scholar John P. Meier’s extensive research on the history of Jesus.
Daniel J. Myers, associate dean for the social sciences and research in the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, has been appointed vice president and associate provost for faculty affairs at the University, effective July 1.
Vincent P. DeSantis, professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre Dame, died Monday (May 30, 2011) at Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria, British Columbia. He was 94 years old.
Senior Arabic and biology major Ryan Shannon says he learned as much during the University of Notre Dame’s Summer Language Abroad (SLA) program in Jordan as he did during four semesters of Arabic courses on campus. “Before I went to Amman, I had a hard time holding a conversation in Arabic,” Shannon says. “While there, all of a sudden things started making sense and clicking.”
An army officer betrayed by the government and put on trial for a treasonous crime he didn’t commit. A market trader who forges an alliance with a rebel leader in order to feed her starving children. And a man who almost gets himself killed several times in order to get food for his pregnant wife. These are among the scores of survivors Notre Dame anthropologist Catherine Bolten came to know during more than seven years researching post–war Sierra Leone.
In the first study of its kind on K-12 Christian education in North America, University of Notre Dame sociologist David Sikkink, in partnership with Cardus—a public policy think tank—found that while Protestant Christian school graduates show uncommon commitment to their families and churches, donate more money than graduates of other schools, and divorce less, they also have lower incomes, less education, and are less engaged in politics than their Catholic and non-religious private school peers.
Notre Dame psychologists Darcia Narvaez and Daniel Lapsley have won a 2011 Outstanding Book Award for their edited work on the moral dimensions of selfhood and personality.
Notre Dame historian Thomas F.X. Noble has won the 2011 Otto Gründler Book Prize for his work Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
When Notre Dame senior Dan Jacobs signed up for an elective while studying in London last year, he wasn’t expecting that his course selection—seemingly unrelated to his industrial design major—would spark the idea for his B.F.A. thesis project, or potentially help thousands of children.