Ulrich Lehner is the William K. Warren Professor of Theology at Notre Dame. Lehner’s work focuses on Christianity during the early modern period, around 1500 to 1800 A.D. He is currently exploring the daily life and culture of Catholics during this period, including how they worshipped and what they believed. He is particularly interested in questions that also apply to the Church today.
Over the last three years, the Notre Dame International Security Center has added faculty and postdoctoral fellows, expanded its undergraduate and graduate programs, and become a thought leader on issues surrounding national security and innovative approaches to U.S. grand strategy. The center is now continuing to build on that success with $7.66 million in new grants, which will support naming Jim Webb, a former U.S. senator from Virginia and secretary of the Navy, as NDISC's inaugural distinguished fellow; creating a pre-doctoral fellowship program and expanding the current post-doctoral fellows program.
With the 2020 presidential election on the near horizon, sociologist Kraig Beyerlein discusses what he and his co-researcher learned about the political engagement of U.S. congregations — including what surprised him most — and how that may impact results on Nov. 3.
Ernest Morrell, a professor of Africana studies and English, the Coyle Professor in Literacy Education, and director of the Center for Literacy Education at the University of Notre Dame, has collaborated with fellow subject experts to create the first capstone course on the African diaspora for AP Seminar high school teachers and students.
Senior Meg Burns says that the tagline to her experience at Notre Dame could be, “It’s OK to change your mind.” After three semesters majoring in biochemistry, Burns decided to follow her passion and major in art history. Then, during her junior year, she dramatically shifted the focus of her senior thesis after having completed research in Dublin. Looking back, Burns said these moments became valuable learning experiences themselves.
Women in the academic field of psychology are overrepresented at the undergraduate level but, ultimately, underrepresented at senior levels. No gender parity reviews of the discipline had been conducted until a group of scholars, including Lee Anna Clark, the William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Professor of Psychology, decided to take on the task. Clark and the other researchers found that women are less likely to apply for tenure-track positions; however, those who do apply are equally if not more likely to be hired than men.
Senior Sam Cannova’s affinity for problem solving has driven him to pursue a diverse range of experiences at Notre Dame. It has inspired him to dive deep into classic texts, volunteer for a nonprofit in the South Bend community, and travel to South Africa to conduct research on hip-hop culture. He entered Notre Dame intending to major in business but was inspired to try out some Program of Liberal Studies classes after hearing about the experiences of other students in the program.
The Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS) has selected 17 University of Notre Dame students — including 14 from the College of Arts and Letters — for its NDIAS Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program. The 2020-2021 fellowship class will serve as research assistants for NDIAS faculty and Ph.D. fellows, who are focusing on the theme The Nature of Trust.
The economic effects of the coronavius in the U.S. have brought Americans’ preexisting financial precarity into stark focus. Karen Richman, director of undergraduate studies at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, found in a recent study that many people in the U.S. are relying on informal networks of family and friends to stay afloat.
When coronavirus outbreaks threatened the closure of meatpacking facilities across the nation, Notre Dame historian Joshua Specht experienced a striking sense of déjà vu in the parallels to his research on meat production and consumption in the late 19th century. Specht came to Notre Dame in the fall of 2019 soon after publishing his first book, Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America. Recent events at modern meatpacking facilities have intensified interest in his research,
A recent study by University of Notre Dame economists Kasey Buckles, William Evans, and Ethan Lieber — all affiliated with Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) — found that greater exposure to the opioid crisis increases the chance that a child’s mother or father is absent from the household and increases the likelihood that he or she lives in a household headed by a grandparent.
In new research, Rev. Thomas Blantz, C.S.C., Notre Dame professor emeritus of history, presents the story of America’s premier Catholic university from its inception as a French-founded boys’ school in 1842 to its status as an acclaimed undergraduate and international research institution of the 21st century.
Assistant Professor of Economics Michèle Müller-Itten and her co-author, Aniko Öry from Yale University, created a model to investigate what workforce compositions would naturally emerge in a labor market and which would maximize total productivity. Their results show it is often best for optimal efficiency if the minority group is overrepresented in the workforce relative to the majority — a conclusion that flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that affirmative action will eventually be obsolete.
Research by David Cortez, assistant professor of political science, found that Latinxs — regardless of their preferred national/ethnic identity, their identification with the immigrant experience or their attitude toward immigrants — choose to work in immigration for their own economic interest.
Dominique Vargas discusses how the body works as a metaphor in contemporary American literature and why it is important to question the global politics and economic institutions that dominate, regulate, and sometimes criminalize the body as commodity, labor, and threat.
Paul Ocobock, a Notre Dame associate professor of history, has received a fellowship from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to study the complex economic and cultural connections between coffee lovers and the men, women, and children who grow the beans in places like Kenya. The New Directions Fellowship will support Ocobock’s research of key forces in the history of international trade for his book Imperial Blend: Kenyan Coffee and Capitalism in the Era of Anglo-American Empire, and to develop new courses on global economic history.
Theodore J. Cachey Jr., a professor of Italian and the Albert J. and Helen M. Ravarino Family Director of Dante and Italian Studies, has been invited to sit on the scientific committee for the 2021 Dante centenary, organized by the Pontifical Council for Culture. He is the sole representative of Dante studies outside of Italy to participate in the deliberations of the planning committee.
To get a clearer picture of people’s mobility in the U.S. during the lockdown period, William Evans and Christopher Cronin, economics researchers at Notre Dame, gathered and analyzed all U.S. coronavirus-related state and local orders and compared them with geolocation data collected across 40 million cellular devices that have opted-in to location sharing services.
Denis Robichaud, an associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies, has been awarded the I Tatti Jean-François Malle Residential Fellowship for his project, Controversies over God and Being in the Italian Renaissance: religion, philosophy, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s De ente et uno. As one of 15 recipients awarded an I Tatti residential fellowship, Robichaud will spend a year researching and writing at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy.
Notre Dame anthropologist Alex Chávez has been named one of 10 Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The award supports junior faculty whose research focuses on contemporary American history, politics, culture, and society, and who are committed to the creation of an inclusive campus community for underrepresented students and scholars.
The University of Notre Dame in partnership with IBM today launched a collaboration that will address the myriad ethical concerns raised by the use of advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and quantum computing, to address society’s most pressing problems. Funded by a 10-year, $20 million IBM commitment, the new Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab will conduct applied research and promote models for the ethical application of technology within the tech sector, business and government.
Mark McKenna, the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law and director of the Law School’s Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law, has been named the founding director of the University of Notre Dame’s Technology Ethics Center. ND-TEC was formed as a result of interest and leadership from Sarah Mustillo, dean of the College of Arts and Letters, and Provost Thomas G. Burish.
Buttigieg will work on two research projects at the NDIAS: one that explores how to restore trust in political institutions and another that considers the forces distinctively shaping the 2020s.
Twenty-six University of Notre Dame students and alumni — including 20 from the College of Arts and Letters — have been awarded Fulbright U.S. Student Program grants to teach or study abroad during the 2020-21 academic year. Notre Dame has been a top producer of Fulbright students for six consecutive years.
Firing a portable X-ray fluorescence scanner at 2,000-year-old artifacts last summer, Claire Stanecki discovered the value of hands-on education. A 2020 graduate who majored in anthropology and Spanish, Stanecki’s Arts and Letters education has been defined by exploring nontraditional forms of learning — from conducting research at a museum to studying the benefits of bilingual education in a local school. “The ability to learn about something and actually go interact with it is so incredibly mind-blowing,” she said.
At Notre Dame, senior Emily Pohl found a passion for social change — and put it into action. An international economics major with a concentration in French, Pohl worked to combat the cycle of poverty by researching and implementing microfinance initiatives. She is graduating with a portfolio of real-world research experiences, a published journal article, and a position at LEK Consulting in Chicago. And it was her Arts and Letters education that empowered her to take action.
The Program of Liberal Studies’ motto — Learn what it means to be human — is a phrase that Notre Dame senior McKenna Cassidy has taken to heart. She grappled with big ideas in her Arts and Letters courses, traveled to Italy to research Renaissance mealtime rituals, and followed her passions to a career in the wine industry. “That motto is a wonderful goal for each individual,” Cassidy said. “It is important to understand who I am and why I’m here, and I’m grateful for the space that the College of Arts and Letters has created for me to discern that question.”
Agustín Fuentes, the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C. Chair in Anthropology, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers. He is among more than 250 members of the 240th AAAS class, which includes singer-songwriter Joan Baez, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, and filmmaker Richard Linklater.
Seniors Kendrick Peterson and Andrew Jarocki are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they brought their perspectives together for research they hope will make an impact on the South Bend community. The pair chose to team up for their Hesburgh Program in Public Service capstone project — searching for a solution to reducing recidivism that Democrats and Republicans can agree on.
What Karen Graubart didn’t find in archives in Spain and Peru was, in some ways, as valuable as what she did. An associate professor in the Department of History, Graubart has spent more than 15 years conducting archival research on women and non-dominant communities in the Iberian Empire for her first two books. But she is also considering how the archives themselves have shaped her research — by questioning who is represented in them and why.