Notre Dame Faculty Receive Grants for Peace Research

Author: Arts and Letters

Six University of Notre Dame professors who are fellows of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies have received grants for research that intersects with issues of peace and conflict.

Receiving Kroc Faculty Fellow Research Grants are:

  • Viva Bartkus, associate professor of management, for a project in which she and Notre Dame MBA students investigated the role of business in post-war reconstruction efforts in Bosnia and Lebanon;
  • Eileen Hunt Botting, Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs Associate Professor of Political Science, to explore how Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, the leading philosophers of women’s rights in the 19th century, contributed to the invention of feminism and its intersection with peace, labor and human rights movements;
  • E. Mark Cummings, professor and Notre Dame Chair of Psychology, for a study on the effects of political violence on children in Croatia, a continuation of a five-year project examining political violence on children in Northern Ireland; Kroc doctoral student Laura Taylor will be working with Cummings on the project;
  • Michael C. Desch, professor of political science, to analyze the trends, causes and consequences of the waning influence of academics on U.S. national security policy and offer guidance on how scholars and policymakers can engage each other on national security issues.

Receiving Kroc Faculty Associate Fellowships are:

  • Sebastian Rosato, assistant professor of political science, to work on a book about the construction of the European Union, focusing on the causes of European integration and the wider debate among international relations scholars about the causes of war and peace;
  • Todd D. Whitmore, associate professor of theology, for work in Uganda on a book that explores the conditions under which people are willing to undertake risks, even to their own lives, in situations of armed conflict.

Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute is one of the world’s principal centers for the study of the causes of violent conflict and strategies for sustainable peace.

More information is available on the Web at http://kroc.nd.edu .

Originally published by Joan Fallon at newsinfo.nd.edu on July 15, 2009.