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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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“The annual Library Research Award advances Notre Dame’s mission by recognizing two of the University’s primary goals: to offer a nurturing, unsurpassed undergraduate education and to advance human understanding through scholarship and research that heals, unifies and enlightens,” said K. Matthew Dames, the Edward H. Arnold Dean of Hesburgh Libraries and University of Notre Dame Press "Building these skills is critical to academic success on campus and in the world beyond graduation.”

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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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Abigail Jorgensen will be an assistant professor of sociology and health care ethics at Saint Louis University, Austin Wyman will continue at Notre Dame as a doctoral student in quantitative psychology, and Blake Ziegler will teach social studies at the Delores Taylor Arthur School for Young Men. 

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Through her research, Anna Haskins learned that fathers who were formerly incarcerated engaged less with their children’s school than parents who haven’t been detained. She and a team of undergraduate and graduate students are now examining why that’s the case, with a goal of creating interventions that address needs of both families and schools.

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“In collaboration with our community partners, we want to make this more than just a baseball field. We want this to be a living museum and a place of advocacy,” said Clinton Carlson. “It’s not just about the history of these teams. Ultimately, our goal is that these histories become powerful stories that impact our community to be more inclusive, more equitable and more accessible for everyone.”

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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“There’s something unique about Avery, and maybe this speaks to students at (Notre Dame), but it really does pay for people at the end of the day to raise their hand and show up and show initiative,” said David Schultz, who co-wrote Trumpism: American Politics in the Age of Politainment.“There are so few people who do that, so few people in general, let alone students, who say, ‘I’ll step forward.’”

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Daniel Lapsley grew up near Pittsburgh, where his father was a steel worker and his mother was a homemaker. Today, he researches adolescent invulnerability and risk behavior, narcissism, separation-individuation, self, ego and identity development, and college adjustment. He also works with the Building Bridges Mentoring Program, which connects students of color with faculty in departments they wish to explore academically.

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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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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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“As I create art and share it with those around me, I am provided with a great support system that provides both feedback and connections with people who may be in the hunt for creative services that I can offer,” said Grosso, who is an resident advisor, dances with Ballet Folklorico Azul Y Oro, and has served as a minister at the Latino First Year Retreat.

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Sophia Alvarez's favorite class is CogSci Goes to School, which examines how cognitive science informs educational practices; it includes tutoring in area schools. Ryan Van Kirk enjoyed Childhood Maltreatment Practicum, which involves mentoring a child in the foster care system. For Chris Walsh, Drunk on Film fostered meaningful discussions about the normalization of binge drinking in our culture.

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In Bridger-Teton National Forest last summer, nine incoming Notre Dame merit scholars camped for four nights as part of an excursion sponsored by the Institute for Latino Studies. The newest group of Latino Studies merit scholars, also known as LSSP 6, hiked 3-6 miles a day. "Overall, it was the bonding experiences between my fellow scholars that I most appreciated," said Johanna Jimenez, a pre-health major from Minneapolis.

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When Opera Notre Dame’s first film production made its debut last year, it was immediately recognized as a novel way to safely create and share a musical performance during the height of the pandemic. Now, Please Look: A Cinematic Opera Experience has won the inaugural Award for Digital Excellence in the university/conservatory category from Opera America, the hub of the national opera community. The award highlights how supporting the creative vision of faculty and students has made the University a pioneer in the future of an art form as it wades into the new entertainment reality of streaming video. 

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Sophomore history and political science major Michael Donelan considers Moby-Dick & 19th-Century America with Jake Lundberg to be one of the most exciting courses he has taken while at Notre Dame. In this Q&A, he discusses the appeal of the small, seminar-style class in which students explore Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece as a gateway into learning about life in 19th-century America as a whole.

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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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