Centers, Institutes & Special Programs

Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good

Founded by the College of Arts & Letters in 1984 as the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts and renamed in 2025, the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good helps advance research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. To accomplish this goal, the institute provides faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the College with three main types of support.

Institute for Latino Studies

The Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) advances understanding of the fastest-growing and youngest population in the United States and the U.S. Catholic Church. It strengthens the University of Notre Dame’s mission to prepare transformative leaders in all areas of society, including the arts, sciences, business, politics, faith, and family life.

Medieval Institute

Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute, with fifty faculty fellows from thirteen different departments and an unparalleled library and growing manuscript collection, is the nation’s largest and most prestigious center for understanding the Middle Ages. Our conferences and lecture series bring the world’s leading scholars to campus.

Rooney Democracy Institute

The mission of the Francis and Kathleen Rooney Democracy Institute is to examine politics and policymaking in the United States—leaving Notre Dame’s distinctive imprint on the study of American democracy. With a grounding in Notre Dame’s Catholic mission, the Rooney Democracy Institute facilitates research on the critical issues facing America’s democratic system and encourages Notre Dame’s students to be engaged in both civic and political life.

Veldman Family Psychology Clinic

The Wilma and Peter Veldman Family Psychology Clinic at the University of Notre Dame provides mental health solutions through evidence-based practices, collaborative research, and innovative services.

Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government

Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government seeks to cultivate thoughtful and educated citizens by supporting scholarship and education concerning the ideas and institutions of constitutional government. The Center aims to explore the fundamental principles and practices of a free society so that citizens and civic leaders are equipped to secure our God-given natural rights, exercise the responsibilities of self-government, and pursue the common good.

Center for Italian Studies

The Notre Dame Center for Italian Studies organizes and supports research, education, and outreach initiatives in Italian Studies, including those of the Devers Family Program in Dante Studies, together with partners on campus, in Rome, and around the world.

Center for Philosophy of Religion

The Center for Philosophy of Religion's primary mission is to promote work on topics in the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, and to encourage the development and exploration of specifically Christian and theistic philosophy. We also aim to foster dialogue between the disciplines of philosophy and theology on topics of mutual interest, and to disseminate the results of scholarly research on these issues both within the academy and to a wider, non-academic audience.

Center for the Study of Religion and Society

The Center for the Study of Religion and Society at Notre Dame is dedicated to advancing social scientific understanding of religion in society through scholarly research, training, and publications. Activities facilitated by the Center include major data collection projects, seminars, colloquia, lectures, conferences, grant writing, and the building of an infrastructure for survey, interviews-based, and participant-observation social research. The Center combines an emphasis on the insight and richness of cultural analyses with the strength of large-scale survey research.

Center for the Study of Social Movements & Social Change

The Center for the Study of Social Movements (CSSM) is a vibrant community of faculty and graduate students at the University of Notre Dame, dedicated to promoting our understanding of social movements and social change.

Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism

Cushwa Center seminars, conferences, research projects, and publications engage a national body of scholars from disciplines including history, theology, women’s studies, sociology, American studies, religious studies, and English. The center also provides resources and critical commentary to the media reporting on U.S. Catholicism, and collaborates with Church leaders to enhance the vitality of Catholic life in the United States.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture

The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture is committed to sharing the richness of the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition through teaching, research, and public engagement, at the highest level and across a range of disciplines – both on campus at the University of Notre Dame, and as Notre Dame in the public square. Our director, fellows, and affiliated scholars publish cutting-edge research, including the de Nicola Center’s various book series with the University of Notre Dame Press, which each feature first-rate scholarship that brings a distinctive voice to the most important conversations in elite academia.

Devers Program in Dante Studies

The Devers Program at the University of Notre Dame supports teaching and research about Dante across the Arts & Letters curriculum, in particular in the Medieval and Italian Studies areas, through the sponsorship of publications, grants and scholarships, conferences, lecture series, seminars, visiting professorships, and class visits, as well as rare book acquisitions in the Zahm Dante Collection.

Human Neuroimaging Center

At the University of Notre Dame, neuroscience opens new ways of understanding the human mind and the lives it shapes. Advances in brain imaging now allow us to see the brain with remarkable precision, revealing the constellation of networks that underlie perception, memory, language, and thought. Once uncovered, insights from neuroscience move beyond the laboratory, shaping how learning is defined, how mental illness is understood, and how responsibility and care are imagined.

Initiative on Race and Resilience

Global in scope and comparative and interdisciplinary in critical approach, the Initiative on Race and Resilience promotes multiracial collaboration, qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and inclusive pedagogy. Equally as important, the Initiative embraces the arts as a means to examine race more substantively and thus to attend to the forms of oppression it produces as well as the identities and forms or resistance it enables.

Maritain Center

The mission of the Jacques Maritain Center takes inspiration from its namesake, Jacques Maritain, one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, whose wide-ranging work made signal contributions to the Thomistic revival, to Vatican II, and to the UN Declaration on Human Rights:

With Maritain as its model, the Jacques Maritain Center aims to foster deep intellectual conversations and world-class research on the perennial questions of human existence, drawing special inspiration from the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and Maritain’s own vision of “integral Christian humanism,” but alsalso more broadly from the great traditions of human reasoning in conversation with faith.

O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center

Since 2008, the O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center (ONDISC) has provided a forum for national security scholars at the University of Notre Dame and elsewhere to come together to explore the most pressing issues in national security policy. Through research, teaching, and public affairs programming, the O’Brien Center aims to connect policymakers and the public with the very best scholarship in the academy on issues of international security, broadly defined.

Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values

The John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values brings the sciences and humanities together to explore the nature and impact of science, technology, and medicine. It supports research in these areas through conferences, workshops, and visitors, and through postdoctoral and writer-in-residence programs. By means of education and degree programs, it inspires undergraduate and graduate students to reflect upon connections across disciplines and to examine science, technology, and medicine through the lens of the liberal arts and in the service of human dignity and the common good.

William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families

At the University of Notre Dame’s William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families, we conduct innovative research to understand and support healthy development across the lifespan. Our affiliated faculty and students are from the departments of psychology, anthropology, sociology, as well as other units within the University. The Shaw Center facilitates research by providing shared laboratory space as well as staff assistance for grant-writing, management, and participant recruitment.

Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO)

We believe that academic researchers, service providers, and policymakers all play a critical role in ending poverty. LEO matches top researchers with passionate leaders in the social service sector to conduct impact evaluations that identify the innovative, effective, and scalable programs and policies that help people move permanently out of poverty.

History of Philosophy Forum

The History of Philosophy Forum is Notre Dame’s hub for research activity in the history of philosophy, drawing on our exceptionally large research community on campus in interlinked areas including Christian, Jewish, and Muslim intellectual traditions, intellectual history, history of political thought, history of the study of the natural world, and more.

Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

The Provost's Office, the Graduate School, and the College of Arts and Letters created the Provost's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in 2025 to serve an integral role in the University of Notre Dame’s Strategic Framework. It supports outstanding early-career scholars seeking to make a difference in the world in an academic environment that is both committed to disciplinary expertise and vibrant in interdisciplinary exchange.