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"I was a science business major up until junior year. Everything changed when I studied abroad in London and interned for a member of Parliament. I loved both the internship and the accompanying British politics class, and I realized that if I wanted to study political science and pursue a career in that field, I needed to change my major immediately to graduate on time. I'm so glad I did." 

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“To win a Fulbright award is a badge of honor that is recognized and respected everywhere in the world," said Thomas Fuja, interim vice president, associate provost and dean of the Graduate School. We should all be proud that Notre Dame students can successfully compete in such a prestigious program — and even more proud that they are motivated to take their talents and training and go be a force for good throughout the world.”

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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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At Harvard, Van der Vliet Oloomi plans to work on her next novel, a "work of speculative fiction about America's continuously evolving definitions of freedom as well as the corresponding shifts in constructions of American Identity in relation to nature and notions of the wild." 

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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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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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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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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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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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Notre Dame psychology professors Laura Miller-Graff and E. Mark Cummings have developed an intervention and support program to support Palestinian families in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza who are affected by ongoing conflict there. The two have worked in partnership with Palestinian organizations for years to develop a program that’s sustainable and culturally and evidence-based, and now hope it can benefit families in other high-risk areas around the world.
 

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Throughout Alison Rice's career, her research, writing and teaching have amplified the voices and experiences of women, including those from underrepresented communities, on campus and around the world. Her latest work elevates the creative writing of women who come to Paris and publish prolifically in French, despite it not being their native language — a “literary revolution,” she says, that deserves to be celebrated, as they deploy stylistic and thematic innovations derived from their diverse, and sometimes common, past experiences.

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Jack Heatherman started studying English because he wanted to improve his chances of getting into medical school. It was a decision that ultimately led the senior to a second major, a new career path, an internship that became a job offer, and a passion for writing that inspired him to write a nonfiction travelog and a coming-of-age novel for his senior thesis project.

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Patrick Griffin, the Madden-Hennebry Professor of History and director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, has been named an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, considered the highest academic honor in Ireland. Membership is limited to residents of Ireland, but a small number of honorary non-Irish members are elected each year, a distinction typically reserved for academics who have made a major international contribution in their discipline.

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The LaFortune Ballroom came alive last year during Foreign Language Week 2022 with the smell of food, the beating of drums, the sound of music, and the grace of the dancers from different cultures. Events transported attendees  to different parts of the world, from graceful and elegant classical Chinese dance to the energetic and lively Irish jig performance. Foreign Language Week (FLW) is making a return this year, starting on Saturday, Feb. 11, with a special Chinese New Year celebration, and more than 90 other events across campus celebrating different languages and cultures from around the globe. 

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Notre Dame’s Catholic character and commitment to the humanities endow the University with a unique perspective, and role, in leading an international conversation about addressing the global crisis of climate change, said Roy Scranton, an associate professor of English who directs the Initiative.

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For senior film, television, and theatre major Kiera Russo, taking Cinema of Portugal and Lusophone Africa was a highlight of her sophomore spring semester. Despite not knowing Portuguese, she relished being able to engage in deep discussions with classmates about cinematic productions from Portugal, Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde. In this Q&A, she discusses what the class' most thought-provoking moments, the strong relationship she developed with the professor, and how it changed her understanding of film.

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Notre Dame anthropologist Catherine “Cat” Bolten has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to support the writing of her book that examines links between food insecurity, human population growth and wildlife depletion, land politics and degradation, and climate change in Sierra Leone. The associate professor of anthropology and peace studies is one of 70 scholars — from among more than 1,030 applicants nationwide — to be awarded the competitive fellowships. 

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"I feel like Notre Dame helped me with seizing opportunities to go abroad," said Hayes, who now is attending Officer Candidate School and plans to join the U.S. Navy. "I had never left the country, other than to go to Canada. And then [at Notre Dame], I saw there were study abroad experiences and grants to go abroad. That really gave me the travel bug."

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Junior Nick Huls gained knowledge, confidence, and perspective taking part in the six-week Summer in Berlin Program offered by the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures, which resumed operation in 2022 after being halted for two years due to COVID-19. In addition to taking two courses, the economics major enjoyed traveling; attending plays, concerts, and art exhibits; and sampling food from across the region. “No matter how much you think you know or how many places you go, there are always more perspectives to be appreciated,” he said.

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The College of Arts & Letters has added a minor in international security studies (ISS) to help students understand root causes of war and other violent conflicts in order to pursue paths to peace. Based in the Notre Dame International Security Center (NDISC), the minor will seek to help students deepen their knowledge about national and international security as well as develop an awareness of past and present global conflicts, and access tools to evaluate security arguments.

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In the fields of neuroscience and neuroanatomy, scholars often cite a 93-year-old paper that examines the thickness of cortical folds. The problem, at least for an English-reading audience, is that this knowledge has always been hiding in plain sight. The article was written in German but never fully translated — until now, thanks to a Notre Dame College of Engineering professor and a Class of 2022 graduate with a deep understanding of the language.

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When the College of Arts & Letters launched a new major that allows students to pair computer science with another liberal arts discipline, Grace Conners was one of the first to apply. Now a senior, she has taken extensive computer science coursework in engineering while also having room in her schedule to pursue a supplementary major in peace studies. Along the way, she’s had four internships that have helped her consider what her future career will look like — one that, ideally, involves using computer science as a tool for peacebuilding.

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A new Italian language course led is empowering Notre Dame students to educate students of their own — African refugees who must learn basic Italian before they can relocate to Italy. Through leading online class sessions, five undergraduates from a range of majors and one graduate student sharpened their Italian skills, learned how to teach others, and developed global awareness and empathy for the refugee experience.

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At the end of 2019, there were about 79.5 million forcibly displaced people on the planet, including 26 million refugees, 45.7 million internally displaced people, and 4.2 million asylum seekers. “As we look beyond the staggering numbers, my hope is that readers of the book will come to see the human face of the migrant and the face of God in each migrant,” said Rev. Daniel Groody, C.S.C., Notre Dame's vice president and associate provost for undergraduate education.

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As a child, Emmanuel Katongole went into the forest near his home in Uganda to draw water from the spring and collect firewood for cooking. Now a diocesan priest who has taught theology and peace studies for a decade at Notre Dame, he has worried upon every return home about the intense deforestation destroying his native land. In a country where more than half the population is under age 20, he knew that young people moving to the cities lacked opportunities and needed firewood, leading to rampant tree cutting.

But it wasn’t until reading Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’ that Katongole envisioned a solution that uses education to address both problems — protecting the environment and providing economic opportunities. He joined with several colleagues and the local Catholic Church to found Bethany Land Institute (BLI) in a rural area 25 miles north of the capital city of Kampala.

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Even the most effective poverty alleviation programs in low-income countries can leave some people behind. Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies have a big idea on how to bridge that gap. The new Building Inclusive Growth (BIG) Lab, led by Notre Dame economists Taryn Dinkelman, Lakshmi Iyer, and Joseph Kaboski, will bring some of the world’s best researchers together to develop innovative, long-lasting solutions to help vulnerable populations in developing countries.

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Emilia Justyna Powell, a Notre Dame professor of political science and concurrent professor at The Law School, has won two International Studies Association (ISA) awards for her 2020 book, Islamic Law and International Law: Peaceful Resolution of Disputes. Lauded for its originality, significance, and rigor in international law and religion and international relations, the book covers differences and similarities between the Islamic legal tradition and international law.

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For generations, North Americans have seen media images of poverty, disease, civil war, and crime in Central America, including photographs and videos of Central Americans fleeing violence and of children, some just 2 or 3 years old, kept in cages at immigration detention camps. Even when well-intentioned, the images can feed into negative stereotypes, said Tatiana Reinoza, an assistant professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design. Reinoza has won a competitive Getty Scholar Grant that will support her effort to more fully represent the seven-country region, its people, and their stories with her book project, tentatively titled “Retorno: Art and Kinship in the making of a Central American Diaspora.”

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