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Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study receives $2.97 million grant from John Templeton Foundation to develop signature courses on human flourishing

2023-08-07T09:28:00-04:00

The John Templeton Foundation has awarded the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS) a $2.97 million grant to support faculty seeking to translate research on human flourishing into “signature courses” — pedagogically innovative, large-scale courses that have an outsize impact on a university curriculum and the broader public discussion.

The three-year grant will provide funding for 15 faculty members from Notre Dame and national or international institutions to join the NDIAS as Signature Course Fellows, where they will spend a semester or summer in residence developing signature courses on topics connected to human flourishing.

“As we confront a period of unprecedented social, economic and technological change, new questions are emerging about how to build happy and meaningful lives,” said Meghan Sullivan, director of the NDIAS and the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. “We believe that with the right support, signature courses have a singular power to transform how we approach this urgent topic, both within the academy and in the broader public debate. Thanks to the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, researchers will now have the opportunity to gain the time, resources and training they need to build a course that will transform their students, positively influence the public debate and accelerate their careers.”

Sullivan’s own signature course, God and the Good Life, has instructed thousands of students since its beginning in 2016 and is now a primary way for students to experience philosophy at Notre Dame. The course served as the basis of Sullivan’s recent book, “The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning” (Penguin Books, 2022), co-authored with her fellow God and the Good Life instructor, Paul Blaschko, assistant teaching professor of philosophy and director of the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society.

“The success of Meghan Sullivan’s God and the Good Life course at Notre Dame speaks to the deep desire for meaning among contemporary students,” said John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost at the University of Notre Dame. “Meghan’s signature course has benefited thousands of Notre Dame undergraduates and served as a national model for innovative pedagogy. I am grateful to the Templeton Foundation for recognizing her work and providing an opportunity for Notre Dame to support faculty from across the country seeking to develop similarly transformational courses.”

The Signature Course Fellowship program includes a robust lineup of activities designed to help faculty develop, launch and maintain their courses, including a four-day opening retreat, weekly planning seminars, and training sessions led by experts on public engagement, website development and co-curricular program building.

After their residency, fellows will launch their course at their home institution and commit to teaching it for at least three semesters. Fellows will convene at the conclusion of the grant for a summative conference, providing them the opportunity to demonstrate course content and share lessons learned.

Semester-long fellows will receive a $50,000 stipend during their semester of residency, and summer-based fellows will receive a $15,000 stipend during their four weeks of residency. All fellows will be given subsidized housing, design funds to help build their courses, a sub-grant to their home university to facilitate the course launch and support from student research assistants.

The grant will also support the hiring of two new NDIAS staff members to help administer the program.

In joining the NDIAS, Signature Course Fellows will become part of an institute that has long sought to make interdisciplinary research on questions related to value, meaning and purpose accessible to broad audiences. Founded in 2008, the NDIAS convenes an interdisciplinary group of faculty fellows, graduate students and undergraduate scholars each year to study questions that engage complex ethical challenges of our time and affect our ability to lead valuable, meaningful lives.

The NDIAS selected “The Good Life” as its organizing research theme for the 2024-25 academic year. The Signature Course Fellows will be integrated into the institute’s broader cohort of Good Life faculty, doctoral and undergraduate fellows and the programming it is developing to support them, such as research seminars, guest lectures, film screenings and community events.

Signature Course Fellowships are open to distinguished or high-potential tenure-stream scholars of any discipline who are developing a signature course on a topic connected to human flourishing. To learn more about the Signature Course Fellowship program, including how to apply, visit ndias.nd.edu/signature-course-fellowship.

Originally published by Kristian Olsen at news.nd.edu on August 04, 2023.

Kristin Shrader-Frechette, professor emerita, wins prestigious award for her work to end environmental injustice

2023-08-04T13:44:00-04:00

Kristin Shrader-Frechette, O’Neill Family Professor Emerita in the University of Notre Dame Department of Philosophy, who had a concurrent appointment in the Department of Biological Sciences, has won the 2023 Cosmos International Prize for her decades of research and pro-bono work to quantify, assess, and stop environmental injustice.

Shrader-Frechette, one of the major developers of methods of quantitative risk assessment, measured and confirmed how heavier air, soil, and water pollution affects areas with higher proportions of people of color, people who earn their living doing manual labor, and people with limited means. She coined the phrase “ecological justice” more than 40 years ago, with the term changing to “environmental justice” over time.

The Cosmos International Prize, awarded by The Commemorative Foundation for the International Garden and Greenery Exposition, Osaka, Japan, 1990 (The Expo ‘90 Foundation), has been granted to researchers including Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Georgina Mace, Estella Leopold, Jane Goodall, and David Attenborough, and comes with a 40-million yen purse, which equates to about $288,000. She plans to donate her winnings to environmental justice charities.

“I was totally surprised to receive this award, and there are at least five other environmental-justice researchers I can think of who deserve it more,” said Shrader-Frechette, whose mother was a Civil Rights leader and instilled the concept early and often. “I don’t think about awards … I spent my life trying to do what I could to help people, and I had no idea that this would be the result.”

She began her career as a mathematician, graduating from Xavier University with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with a physics concentration. She received a fellowship in philosophy of science and mathematics from Notre Dame and graduated with her doctoral degree in philosophy. She worked as a professor at Xavier, the University of Louisville, the University of Florida, and the University of South Florida before joining the faculty at Notre Dame in 1998. Her work focuses on mathematical and statistical approaches to showing how public health conditions are often tied to where people live and work. She frequently took her undergraduate students at Notre Dame to the south side of Chicago as part of their research projects.

The distinction is prestigious for both Shrader-Frechette and the University of Notre Dame, said Jason Rohr, the Ludmilla F., Stephen J., and Robert T. Galla College Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Biological Sciences.

"Dr. Shrader-Frechette is now in the company of international household names that dedicated their lives to the harmonious coexistence between nature and humans,” he said. “This is the kind of award that most researchers studying the natural world can only dream of winning."

Shrader-Frechette stressed the importance of using mathematics and statistics when talking about environmental justice, and said more students should be required to take science, computational science, and other mathematics courses.

“To the extent that this work is successful, it’s because we were able to use quantitative risk assessment,” said Shrader-Frechette, who received funding from the National Science Foundation for 28 years. “We needed to use modeling—and put numbers, costs, and benefits on these issues, so people were forced to listen.”

She pointed out that people cannot control where they were born or live, or whether they had parents who read to them and helped them with homework.

“I hope this award means that people will pay attention to the way people of color, and working-class people, are treated in all countries of the world,” she said. “They breathe air that’s anywhere from 2-5 times dirtier than what most others breathe, and most people don’t realize this fact.

“Government and industry get away with this injustice unless there’s somebody, usually an academic, who will help them for free.” Established to commemorate International Horticultural Expo 1990 in Osaka, the Expo ’90 Foundation is responsible for the management of commemorative funds and the promotion of activities that develop the theme of the Expo: "The Harmonious Coexistence of Nature and Mankind."

Originally published by Deanna Csomo Ferrell at science.nd.edu on July 21, 2023.

Access to improved resources fails to impact economic outcomes for Black families across generations

2023-07-19T07:33:00-04:00

For many, neighborhoods that offer children access to better resources, less crime and less violence often result in better opportunities for healthier and more prosperous lives. Indeed, researchers studying the effects of moving to “opportunity neighborhoods” argue that very point and many policymakers have taken notice. However, so far, researchers have only accounted for the neighborhoods where children grow up, ignoring the long-term effects that parents’ childhood neighborhoods have on children’s adult economic well-being.

Steven Alvarado

Expanding on the relatively short-term and single-generation body of research, University of Notre Dame assistant professor of sociology Steven Alvarado used 35 years of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 to 2014 to study what happened when multiple generations of Black, white and Latino families lived in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Somewhat surprisingly, Alvarado and his co-author, Alexandra Cooperstock, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Cornell University, found that Black families — regardless of where they were raised — still ended up in similar economic circumstances as they moved into adulthood and entered the workforce.

In their study, “The Echo of Neighborhood Disadvantage: Multigenerational Contextual Hardship and Adult Income for Whites, Blacks, and Latinos,” which was recently published in the journal City and Community, the researchers concluded that race was the chief factor in contributing to one’s economic success in the U.S. over multiple generations.

“Any benefits accrued by growing up in more advantaged neighborhoods may be undercut by enhanced discrimination in the labor market and society at large,” the researchers wrote. “Race, not class origins, is the dominant factor governing the economic mobility of Black individuals.”

The researchers used the following seven variables when defining an “advantaged” versus a “disadvantaged” neighborhood: percent of residents at or below the poverty threshold, percent jobless, percent not in the labor force, percent with at least a bachelor’s degree, percent who are managers and professionals, median household income and median housing value.

Alvarado explained that neighborhood mobility does not work as well for Black individuals in the United States as it does for white and Latino individuals in terms of economic development.

“When comparing Black families who were exposed to multiple generations of neighborhood disadvantage versus Black families who were not, they both end up having the same economic outcomes in adulthood,” he said. “Race still trumps class origins in America when it comes to the labor market.”

Alvarado said his study employed a novel technique not used in previous studies of the effects of neighborhood processes on economic outcomes: the examination of intergenerational associations rather than just using a single generation. The researchers linked exposure to neighborhood disadvantage in both mothers’ and children’s childhoods with the adult income of the children — which, researchers wrote, “will provide a more complete picture of neighborhood influence and expand our understanding of how inequality forms and is maintained over time.”

The longitudinal survey data allowed the researchers to link neighborhood conditions with economic outcomes across multiple generations for white, Latino and Black families.

“When comparing Black families who were exposed to multiple generations of neighborhood disadvantage versus Black families who were not, they both end up having the same economic outcomes in adulthood. Race still trumps class origins in America when it comes to the labor market.”

One of the more compelling findings of their study, researchers said, was that Latino families experienced the most positive growth in adult earnings. These findings suggest that Latinos — especially non-Black Latinos — are likely to benefit more in the long run, economically speaking, than white or Black individuals when removed from their disadvantaged neighborhoods.

“There’s definitely a lot more room for neighborhood-level opportunity to manifest into economic success for Latino than for Black individuals,” Alvarado added.

And Black residents’ incomes, the researchers said, “continue to be immune” to whether their family experienced a disadvantaged or advantaged neighborhood across multiple generations.

“Moving Black individuals to 'opportunity neighborhoods' could procure positive outcomes — such as improved cognitive development and behavior and decreased illicit drug use during childhood and adolescence,” Alvarado concluded. “But once it gets to the labor market, it’s a whole different story.”

The researchers argued that structural change is needed in the way that Black individuals are treated in the U.S. labor market to increase their economic success. Efforts to simply move Black residents to more advantaged neighborhoods “are unlikely to have a significant impact on racial income gaps."

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, assistant director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Tracy DeStazio at news.nd.edu on June 27, 2023.

Three Notre Dame faculty members win first-place book awards from Catholic Media Association

2023-07-18T08:00:00-04:00

Six University of Notre Dame faculty members garnered seven book awards, including three first-place honors, from the Catholic Media Association in 2023.

Fr. Dan Groody, C.S.C., professor of theology and global affairs and vice president and associate provost for undergraduate education, took top honors in the Theology–History of Theology, Church Fathers and Mothers category for his book, A Theology of Migration: The Bodies of Refugees and the Body of Christ.

Fr. Emmanuel Katongole, professor of theology and peace studies, earned first place in the Gender Issues–Inclusion in the Church category for Who Are My People?: Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa.

And Timothy P. O’Malley, professor of the practice and director of education at the McGrath Institute for Church Life and academic director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, won in the Future Church category for Becoming Eucharistic People.

Fr. Dan Groody

Father Groody’s A Theology of Migration, which has a foreword written by Pope Francis, draws upon first-hand accounts of narratives of those migrating around the world and reflects upon them under the light of the God, who first migrated to our world in the person of Jesus Christ.

“In a world where so many migrants are considered ‘no-bodies,’ it reminds of their desire to become somebody, their connection to everybody, and ultimately their relationship to the body of Christ,” he said. “This award is about highlighting their journey of hope and its integral relationship to our own.”

Judges called the book a timely and immensely important contribution to the field of contemporary theological studies.

“Groody views the current global crisis of the migration of peoples through the lens of the Eucharistic action of the Church. He develops a spirituality of migration that is at the heart of every believer’s journey of faith,” they wrote.

“His connection between the ‘bodies of refugees’ and the ‘Body of Christ,’ understood as both the person of Christ and the persons of all the faithful, is imaginative, theologically solid and, if put into practice, transformative for every believer and for the Church itself.”

Fr. Emmanuel Katongole

Father Katongole said he is humbled and delighted that the CMA chose Who Are My People?, which examines what it means to be an African and a Christian in a continent often riddled with violence, for a first-place award.

“It is a great honor to me personally, but a confirmation that the gender and identity issues that the book discusses are important issues not only in Africa but for the global church. I look forward to the conversation that will be generated by this recognition.”

A judge described Who Are My People? — which traces the crisis of recurring violence through three markers of identity: ethnicity, religion, and land — as an important, well-written, and readable exploration of issues of identity, violence, and peace in Africa.

“The conclusions Katongole draws also have broader implications,” the judge wrote. “I especially thought the stories of individuals and programs were well done, and I appreciated the photos…I hope Catholics and others read it to learn more about these urgent issues facing Africa and our world.”

Timothy O'Malley

O’Malley said the CMA’s recognition for Becoming Eucharistic People is meaningful because it's written from the heart of the mission of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy.

The book outlines four essential dimensions of a Eucharistic culture in a parish: liturgies of joyful reverence that celebrate the gifts of diversity; formation that engages the mind, imagination, understanding, and will; a rich life of popular piety and the vibrancy of the domestic Church; and a commitment to solidarity with neighbors.

“We think that the rites of the Church are not just quaint exercises in piety,” said O’Malley, “but opportunities for the renewal of an imagination that perceives the gratuity of the world sending forth Catholics from parishes who can sanctify the cosmos and create a culture marked by friendship, reverence for the dignity of the person, the common good, solidarity, and justice.”

Judges wrote that O’Malley “offers a deep appreciation of what the Eucharist means personally and communally and how it truly is the ‘source and summit’ for the Christian life in the world.”

O'Malley also earned a second-place award in the Sacraments category for Invitations and Encounter: Evangelizing Through the Sacraments, which presents a pastoral introduction to sacramental theology from the standpoint of evangelization.

J. Matthew Ashley, associate professor of theology, took second place in the Theology–Theological and Philosophical Studies category for Renewing Theology: Ignatian Spirituality and Karl Rahner, Ignacio Ellacuría, and Pope Francis.

In this comprehensive study that investigates the role that Ignatian spirituality has played in the renewal of academic theology, Ashley offers three case studies to show how each Jesuit ― Rahner, Ellacuría, and Pope Francis ― responded to challenges of modernity on the basis of his experience and understanding of Ignatian spirituality..

Clemens Sedmak, director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and professor of social ethics, garnered second place in the Catholic Social Teaching section for Enacting Catholic Social Tradition: The Deep Practice of Human Dignity.

In the book, Sedmak emphasizes that Catholic social tradition stems from moral guidance directly inspired by Scripture, especially the command to love Christ and the neighbor, even if doing so is extremely difficult in real-life situations.

Leonard DeLorenzo, professor of the practice and director of undergraduate studies at the McGrath Institute for Church Life, earned third place in the Grief and Bereavement division for Our Faithful Departed.

In Our Faithful Departed, DeLorenzo discusses what “life is changed not ended” in the funeral liturgy means and how Catholics are called to remain faithful in their relationships with the dead.

The Catholic Media Association, which has been uniting and serving Catholic journalists since 1911, facilitates the professional development and spiritual growth of its members.

Lab for Economic Opportunities study: Targeted emergency financial assistance helps prevent homelessness

2023-07-13T11:01:00-04:00

Homelessness has become an increasingly worrisome crisis in the United States over the past several years, but a new study from the University of Notre Dame shows that efforts to prevent homelessness work.

The issue has reached such proportions in California, for example, that mayors of several major cities have declared a state of emergency on homelessness. In response, leaders in California have invested billions in homelessness programs, including some that target prevention.

Prevention efforts, however, have led to questions — even from organizations committed to addressing homelessness — as to whether such programs are effective, due to the difficulty of targeting assistance to those with the greatest risk of becoming homeless. To test the impact of providing financial assistance to those susceptible to losing their housing, researchers at Notre Dame conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effect of emergency financial assistance (EFA) on families receiving support through the Santa Clara County Homelessness Prevention System, which is co-led by Destination: Home, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending homelessness in Silicon Valley.

David Phillips

David Phillips, a research professor in the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) within Notre Dame’s economics department, and James Sullivan, a professor of economics and co-founder of LEO, found that people offered EFA were 81% less likely to become homeless within six months of enrollment and 73% less likely within 12 months, as reported in their study recently published by The Review of Economics and Statistics.

The study evaluated individuals and families at imminent risk of being evicted or becoming homeless who were allocated EFA between July 2019 and December 2020, with the average household receiving nearly $2,000. Recipients were chosen from among a larger group of people eligible for the program based on their vulnerability to homelessness and on a randomized system set up by LEO and Destination: Home. This temporary financial assistance helped pay rent, utilities or other housing-related expenses on their behalf.

A common approach to fighting homelessness is to provide shelter to those who are already homeless, but the researchers argued that once a family or individual becomes homeless, they face even more difficulties — such as finding permanent housing, basic necessities and health care. They are also more likely to become involved in the criminal justice system and experience frequent hospital visits. LEO’s study found that a preventive approach focusing directly on helping those who are on the brink of homelessness can also be effective.

“Our estimates suggest that the benefits to homelessness prevention exceed the costs,” the researchers said. They estimated that communities get $2.47 back in benefits per net dollar spent on emergency financial assistance.

“This study shows that you can actually target the intervention to those at risk, which moves the needle on homelessness enough to justify making the investment.”

— James Sullivan

James Sullivan

“Policymakers at all levels are struggling to make really hard decisions about how to allocate scarce resources to address this pervasive problem,” Sullivan said. “But this study shows that you can actually target the intervention to those at risk, which moves the needle on homelessness enough to justify making the investment.”

Phillips added that while homelessness prevention programs are not a panacea to other problems often associated with the most visible forms of homelessness — such as health and substance abuse issues — it is still an effective way to help people.

“Every person who ends up homeless is a little different from the next, and the reasons they’re there are different, but it’s the kind of help they need at the moment they need it, before everything falls apart,” Phillips said.

One of LEO’s main tenets is to take a rigorous approach to fighting poverty by helping service providers apply scientific evaluation methods to better understand and share effective poverty interventions. Said Sullivan, “A big part of LEO’s mission is to create evidence that helps improve the lives of those most vulnerable. Because we have far greater needs than we have resources to address them, we have a real incentive to allocate those resources to the programs that are most effective. This evidence helps shape the decisions of those on the front lines fighting homelessness and poverty.”

“Every person who ends up homeless is a little different from the next, and the reasons they’re there are different, but it’s the kind of help they need at the moment they need it, before everything falls apart.”

— David Phillips

Jennifer Loving, chief executive officer of Destination: Home, said the LEO study has implications both locally and nationally. “This could inspire other jurisdictions to stand up their own homelessness prevention systems, using this research as a model or starting point for how to do that on their own — as well as justification to policymakers for funding,” Loving said.

The Santa Clara County Homelessness Prevention System relies on a partnership to help at-risk families and individuals maintain their housing by providing financial assistance as well as case management, legal assistance, financial counseling and landlord dispute resolution. Destination: Home, one of the system’s lead organizations, gathers funding from the federal, county and city governments, as well as private foundations, and coordinates the efforts of a network of 19 nonprofit partners.

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Tracy DeStazio at news.nd.edu on July 13, 2023.

Romance languages and literatures professor’s book about undocumented migration wins Caribbean Studies Association’s most prestigious prize

2023-07-10T08:00:00-04:00

Marisel Moreno

Notre Dame professor Marisel Moreno’s book about the largely unknown and dangerous phenomenon of undocumented sea migration within the Caribbean region has won the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award, the Caribbean Studies Association’s most prestigious prize.

“Being recognized by my field’s premier scholarly organization is one of the greatest honors of my life,” said Moreno, the Rev. John A. O'Brien College Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures.

“It is especially meaningful to know that even despite the linguistic and cultural differences, as well as the distinct colonial histories that characterize the islands of the archipelago, the book has resonated among Caribbean scholars.”

The annual award is given for the best book about the Caribbean published over the previous year in Spanish, English, French, or Dutch.

In Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature & Art, Moreno seeks to lift the veil of invisibility around intra-Caribbean undocumented migration.

“Because those who tend to risk their lives at sea in order to survive — whether it is due to political persecution, hunger, natural disasters or climate change — tend to be Black, it is also a book that centers Blackness and that grapples with the colonial legacy of anti-Black racism in Hispanophone Caribbean societies and their diasporas,” said Moreno, who is also a fellow of the College of Arts & Letters’ Institute for Latino Studies and the Initiative on Race and Resilience.

“We cannot understand undocumented migration in the Caribbean without understanding anti-Black racism, and how the history of slavery and European/U.S. colonialism has shaped the present.”

“We cannot understand undocumented migration in the Caribbean without understanding anti-Black racism, and how the history of slavery and European/U.S. colonialism has shaped the present.”

Moreno’s interest in the topic was, in part, a result of growing up in Puerto Rico and reading headlines about Haitian and Dominican migrants drowning trying to cross in yolas (makeshift vessels).

“Many years later, in grad school and beyond, I continued to be perplexed by the virtual absence of the Caribbean in border studies,” she said. “That silence — which continues to this day — did not align with the reality of the thousands of lives lost trying to cross the Caribbean.”

“I started to look at literature and art to see how this historical reality had been represented in cultural production, and eventually I understood that I needed to write the book I had been looking for,” said Moreno, who is an affiliated faculty member in the Gender Studies Program and the Department of Africana Studies.

Crossing Waters has also earned the 2023 Isis Duarte Book Prize Honorable Mention from the Latin American Studies Association’s Haiti-Dominican Republic Section.

For Moreno — who is also a faculty fellow with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and Center for Social Concerns — teaching and research are interconnected, with one continually influencing the other.

“Early on, when I was working on Crossing Waters, I designed an upper-level Spanish course based on many of the works that I examine in the book,” she said. “Teaching the course several times as I wrote the manuscript allowed me to think critically, deeply, and consistently about its contents. I don’t think the book would have been as strong without the opportunity to design a course around its main topics.”

Her teaching and service also have earned awards. At Notre Dame, Moreno won the Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award in 2016 and the Rev. William A. Toohey, C.S.C. Award for Social Justice in 2019. And in 2011, she received the Indiana Governor’s Award for Service-Learning.

The co-creator of the digital humanities project Listening to Puerto Rico and co-curator of the exhibit Art at the Service of the People: Posters and Books is now working on a book project, tentatively titled “Eye of the Storm: Hurricane María in Puerto Rican Cultural Production.”

In it, she examines the representation of the hurricane in literature and visual art “to untangle the links between colonialism, anti-Blackness, disaster capitalism, climate change, and migration.”

“It is especially meaningful to know that even despite the linguistic and cultural differences, as well as the distinct colonial histories that characterize the islands of the archipelago, the book has resonated among Caribbean scholars.”

Margaret Meserve named vice president and associate provost for academic space and support

2023-06-16T15:04:45-04:00

Margaret Meserve, the Glynn Family Collegiate Professor of History and co-director of the Glynn Family Honors Program at the University of Notre Dame, has been appointed vice president and associate provost for academic space and support, effective July 1.

In this role, Meserve will work with the University Architect’s office to help manage major new projects for academic units, including new buildings, renovations and moves. In addition, she will manage plans for backfill, swing space and efficient use of existing space on campus and set priorities for the upgrade and repair process.

Meserve will also develop a long-term strategic plan for existing and projected academic space and help to determine standards for utilization of academic space in consultation with Vice President and Associate Provost for Academic Strategy David Go.

“Space is a crucial resource for everyone at Notre Dame, and learning how to do more with the space we have is central to our aspirations in teaching, learning and research,” said John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost. “Margaret is already a trusted partner of the Facilities Design and Operations team and she has helped us tremendously over the past few months as we consider our academic space needs and how to responsibly steward our resources. I look forward to working with her in this expanded role.”

Meserve previously served as associate dean for the humanities and faculty affairs and director of space planning in the College of Arts and Letters, where she provided strategic leadership for 24 renovation projects for humanities departments and programs in Decio and O’Shaughnessy Halls. In January, she was named senior director of academic space for the Provost’s Office.

In her new expanded role, she will split her time equally between the Provost’s Office and her scholarly work, which includes teaching, research and leadership of the Glynn Family Honors Program.

Meserve studies the Italian Renaissance and the histories of printing and book production, history writing, humanist culture and the papacy in the 15th and 16th centuries. Her most recent book, Papal Bull: Print, Politics, and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome, won the American Catholic Historical Association’s Helen & Howard Marraro Prize for the most distinguished work in Italian history published in 2021.

Meserve received her bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard and her master’s and doctorate in Renaissance history from the University of London. She taught at Princeton for two years before coming to Notre Dame in 2003. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies and she is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

She is currently working on a translation of the Commentaries of Pope Pius II, a Renaissance pope known for his urban planning projects and the only pope ever to compose an autobiography while in office.

“I’m thrilled to take on this important role working with partners across campus to make the best use of our academic buildings,” Meserve said. “Notre Dame enjoys an extraordinary architectural heritage and I hope our spaces can promote excellent teaching and research and a stronger sense of academic community among faculty, students and staff.”

Originally published by Kate Garry at news.nd.edu on June 15, 2023.

A Perilous Journey: Economics students witness the challenges of migration in Mexico

2023-06-15T14:05:05-04:00

A group of migrants at a shelter near Puebla, Mexico, sat in a circle of chairs and stared nervously across at five students from Eva Dziadula's Economics of Immigration class and a few other Notre Dame students studying abroad there.

The migrants were nearly all young men from Honduras. How could they describe the harrowing decision to leave their families and homes or the tortuous trip of thousands of miles on top of dangerous freight trains to get to the border of the United States?

Finally, one took the lead and spoke up.

José said he hopes to do carpentry and painting in the U.S. to provide money for his family. At home, he said, he can't make much money no matter how hard he works, and if he saves anything, it's usually stolen. He was making his third attempt without a “coyote” guide, which can cost thousands of dollars he doesn't have.

Asked about dangers on the trip, José shed some tears talking about the violence they face from Mexican authorities and gangs that often rob or beat the migrants. He said they just want to help their families and hope to be treated like human beings.

The students listened in empathetic silence. Then Jack Kelly, a junior studying pre-health and English, responded in his best Spanish.

“Thank you for sharing your story,” Kelly said. “You deserve respect, both as a person and as someone willing to do whatever it takes to help your family. I'm sorry for what you've had to go through.”

With little more solace to offer, the students stood and shook hands with each migrant in the circle. This kind of face-to-face interaction is exactly why Dziadula brings groups of Notre Dame students to Puebla and Mexico City to witness the journey at its midway point—in a course that focuses on the economic factors and outcomes at the start and end of the volatile subject of immigration.

Read the story.

Originally published by Office of Strategic Content at news.nd.edu on June 15, 2023.

Provost McGreevy honors Arts & Letters faculty for excellence in research, teaching, advising, and social justice

2023-06-13T16:25:00-04:00

Faculty members in the College of Arts and Letters were recently honored for excellence by John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost at the University of Notre Dame. The May awards were a part of a broader recognition of faculty members who achieved career milestones this spring.

The annual awards, which celebrate excellence in research, teaching, and other important work supporting Notre Dame’s academic mission, are coordinated by the Office of the Provost, with the exception of the Research Achievement Award and the Toohey Awards, which are presented by Notre Dame Research and the Office of Campus Ministry, respectively.

2022-23 recipients in the College are:

Reinhold Niebuhr Award — Anton Juan, Department of Film, Television, and Theatre

The Reinhold Niebuhr Award is given to a faculty member or administrator whose body of academic work and life promote or exemplify the area of social justice in modern life.

Juan’s sustained commitment as a creative playwright, theater director, and filmmaker is marked by a passionate belief that art is a means to challenge inequality and advocate for social justice. His work speaks with, and on behalf of, marginalized individuals and communities, those in need, and spaces that are often ignored. From stage to film, he consistently calls out political, economic, and climate violence, elevates the voices of the poor and vulnerable across the planet, and shows a deep and profound commitment to social justice and Catholic social teaching. His life and body of academic work are a public witness of Christ’s invitation to love our neighbors as we are loved by God.

Grenville Clark Award — Jennifer Huynh, Department of American Studies

The Grenville Clark Award is given to a faculty member or administrator whose voluntary activities advance the cause of peace and human rights.

Huynh is an educator and researcher whose life inside and outside of the classroom work together for the common good. Her students benefit from her deep connections to the South Bend community, particularly as a board member with the Neighbor to Neighbor organization, which aims to support the resettlement of local refugees. Her work fostering the organization’s core value of intercultural friendships — focusing on connecting refugees and immigrants to people in the South Bend area to be community liaisons — is admirable. With state Rep. Maureen Bauer, she gathered evidence and data to advocate for the right to health care for asylum seekers and lawfully permanent residents in Indiana. She also volunteers, assisting with asylum refugee cases. Through her voluntary activities, research, and advocacy, the daughter of refugees advances the cause of peace and human rights in the South Bend community and beyond.

Research Achievement Award — William Evans, Department of Economics

The Research Achievement Award honors a distinguished faculty member who has made significant contributions to scholarship in his or her discipline and to the research and graduate education goals of the University.

Evans has built an exceptional legacy of impact and influence. He has made significant contributions to the field of economics, particularly in the areas of labor, education, public finance, and health economics. He has advanced our understanding of a wide range of issues central to our everyday lives, including educational attainment, improved labor market outcomes, reduced health disparities, and the impact of policy. His citation count places him in the top 1% of living economists. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a faculty fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Institute for Educational Initiatives. Evans has been a builder at Notre Dame — helping to grow his relatively new department as chair and co-founding the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, a research center focused on evidenced-based solutions to poverty.

Rev. William A. Toohey, C.S.C., Award for Preaching — Rev. Michael Connors, C.S.C., Department of Theology

The Rev. William A. Toohey, C.S.C., Award for Preaching is given to a Holy Cross priest who has made significant contributions to the University of Notre Dame in many different ways, but in particular as a homilist.

Rev. Connors, C.S.C., serves as associate professor of the practice in the Department of Theology, director of the Marten Program in Homiletics and Liturgics, and as the priest-in-residence in Carroll Hall. While Fr. Mike richly deserves this award for his own articulate and deeply prayerful homilies, he also has enhanced the preaching of other priests, seminarians, and lay students at Notre Dame and in dioceses across the country. He has secured funding to develop a preaching academy, established a visiting fellowship to bring top professors of homiletics to teach and engage in research at Notre Dame, and organized biennial national preaching conferences. Throughout these wide-ranging efforts, Fr. Mike has remained faithful to his pastoral presence and thoughtful homilies for the men of Carroll Hall.

Rev. William A. Toohey, C.S.C., Award for Social Justice — Daniel Graff, Department of History and Center for Social Concerns

The Rev. William A. Toohey, C.S.C., Award for Social Justice is given to a member of the Notre Dame faculty or staff who has dedicated himself or herself to teaching and research that emphasize the social justice dimension of the Gospel in an exemplary way.

Graff is the director of the Higgins Labor Program at Notre Dame and holds a joint appointment as professor of the practice in the Department of History. On campus and across the country, Graff illuminates the principle of the dignity of work in our Catholic social tradition. He has dedicated his career to encouraging the Notre Dame community to place the labor question at the center of all human endeavors. Projects such as the Labor Café, Lunchtime Labor RAPS, Higgins Friends and Alumni Network, and the Just Wage Working Group owe their existence to his initiative. His Just Wage Tool, utilized nationally and internationally, uses seven criteria to ensure any given wage fits within the Catholic social tradition framework. Graff has been described as a “voice for the voiceless” for his tireless commitment to labor and gender issues, and his particular respect for those on the periphery.

President’s Award — Stephen Fallon, Program of Liberal Studies and Department of English

The President’s Award recognizes a member of the faculty and/or the administration for distinguished service to the University over an extended period of time.

Fallon is a renowned scholar of Milton, legendary teacher, and passionate advocate for social justice, and he has distinguished himself throughout his 38-year career at Notre Dame.He is a Guggenheim Fellow, has served twice as the president of the Milton Society of America, and has won numerous teaching awards. His Milton Among the Philosophers won the James Holly Hanford Award of the Milton Society of America for the most distinguished book on Milton in 1991, and he was named an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America in 2011. Fallon has twice served as chair of the Program of Liberal Studies and once as chair of the Department of English. He is a founding member of the faculty steering committee for the Moreau College Initiative, a program offering A.A. and B.A. degree programs at Indiana’s Westville Correctional Facility. He also is a co-founder of the South Bend Center for the Homeless/Program of Liberal Studies World Masterpieces Seminar.

In addition, 10 of the 20 faculty members awarded the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching are affiliated with the College. The award is presented to faculty who have had a profound influence on the undergraduate learning experience, elevated students’ intellectual engagement, and fostered students’ ability to express themselves effectively within a disciplinary context.

Honored faculty members in the College of Arts and Letters are:

Laura Betz, Department of English
Kathleen Boyle, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
David Campbell, Department of Political Science
Anne Coleman, Department of American Studies
Anne García-Romero, Department of Film, Television, and Theatre
Daniel Graff, Department of History
James (Jake) Lundberg, Department of History
Margaret Pfeil, Department of Theology
Zhiyong (Johnny) Zhang, Department of Psychology

In addition, Maria McKenna, Professor of the Practice with a joint appointment in the Department of Africana Studies and the Education, Schooling, and Society program, and the director of the Transformational Leaders and AnBryce Scholars, was presented with a Dockweiler Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising.

The Joyce and Dockweiler recipients are selected through a process that includes peer and student nominations.

For more information, visit provost.nd.edu/awards.

Originally published by Kate Garry at news.nd.edu May 23, 2023.

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi earns Pforzheimer Fellowship; 'It Is What It Is' to be featured in Best American Short Stories 2023

2023-05-23T09:28:00-04:00

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, an associate professor of English at Notre Dame, will be a 2023-24 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute.

The Pforzheimer Fellowship offers scholars in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and arts — as well as writers, journalists, and other distinguished professionals — a rare chance to pursue ambitious projects for a full year in a vibrant interdisciplinary setting amid the resources of Harvard. The Radcliffe Institute's 2023–2024 fellows represent 3.3% of the applications received.

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."

In addition, Van der Vliet Oloomi's short story "It Is What It Is" was selected by editors Min Jin Lee and Heidi Pitlor for Best American Short Stories 2023 (forthcoming from Mariner Books in October 2023). Making its first appearance in Electric Literature with an introduction by Alyssa Songsiridej, "It Is What It Is" tells a story of a cat orphaned by violence and a new owner determined to give her "the best Iranian life ever."

I stared at Khorshid’s high cheek bones and exaggeratedly long whiskers, her green eyes through which she looked out at the world in shock and concluded that her owner’s deaths had been a kind of disappearance. No bodies had been recovered. They had turned to ash mid-air and taken their place next to all of the unburied dead. Next to my father who had never been found.

– Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, "It Is What It Is"

Van der Vliet Oloomi, a fellow with the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, has authored three novels, including Savage Tongues (Mariner, 2021) and Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), which won the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the John Gardner Award, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. She received a 2015 Whiting Writers Award and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award for her debut novel, Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012).

She has been supported by an Aspen Institute Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Fellowship from ART OMI, and her work has appeared in Granta, Guernica, The Paris Review, BOMB Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her work also has been translated into half a dozen languages.

At Notre Dame, Van der Vliet Oloomi founded Literatures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance, a bi-annual symposium and lecture series that focuses on the study of literatures that have been shaped by histories of territorial and linguistic politics, colonialism, military domination and gross human rights violations. She serves on the Board of Advisors for Notre Dame's Initiative on Race and Resilience.

Originally published by Paul Cunningham at english.nd.edu on May 22, 2023.

Sociologist Anna Haskins studies impact of criminal legal system on racial disparities in educational outcomes

2023-05-17T07:05:00-04:00

Anna Haskins initially chose a career as an elementary school teacher to address racial disparities in educational outcomes.

Now, the Andrew V. Tackes Associate Professor of Sociology and associate director of the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience approaches the issue on a broader research scale.

“There’s a lot of research in the sociology of education that has really tried to look at the persistence of racial disparities, despite these sort of more direct ways to eliminate racial differences, Brown v. Board of Education and beyond,” Haskins said.

“Some researchers look at neighborhoods; some research looks at wealth. Very few studies had started looking at another sort of social institution that has racial disparities, and that was the criminal legal system.”

So that’s where Haskins directed her attention. Through her research, she 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.

In the three-pronged study, the team is interviewing previously incarcerated parents to determine if their exposure to the criminal legal system led to decreased involvement in their children's education because of a fear of schools.

The researchers also are interviewing education personnel to learn how school environments support system-involved families, and they’re examining whether school facilities — with resource officers, metal detectors, and bullet-proof glass — are becoming more like prisons.

Haskins said she’s excited to be exploring these important questions at Notre Dame and engaging in service work through the Notre Dame Programs for Education in Prison. “It is just a fantastic place to be involved in studying education.”

A&L faculty member and three students earn 2023 Graduate School awards

2023-05-12T07:18:00-04:00

One Arts and Letters faculty member and three students are among the Graduate School's annual award-winners for the 2022–2023 academic year.

Robert Goulding, director of the Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science, and director of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, is the winner of the Dick and Peggy Notebaert Award; Susanna De Stradis ’22, Ph.D. from the Department of History, is the recipient of the Shaheen Award in the Humanities; Luiz Vilaça, Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Sociology, is the recipient of the Shaheen Award in the Social Sciences; and Ester E. Aguirre Alfaro, Master of Arts candidate from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, is the winner of the Social Justice Award.

In addition, the Graduate School named the other following award-winners: Monica C. Regalbuto '89 Ph.D., is the recipient of the Distinguished Graduate Alumni Award; Patricia A. Champion, Ph.D., is the recipient of the James A. Burns, C.S.C., Award; Mark Anthony Caprio, Ph.D., is the winner of the James A. Burns, C.S.C., Award; Laura M. Alderfer, Ph.D. candidate from the Graduate Program in Bioengineering,is the winner of the Shaheen Award in Engineering, and Megan Vahsen, Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Biological Sciences, is the recipient of the Shaheen Award in Science.

All the award-winners will be formally recognized for their achievements May 20 at the Graduate School Commencement Ceremony at Notre Dame Stadium. Below are profiles of the A&L winners. For full award-winner profiles, refer to The Graduate School 2023 Commencement Citation Book.

Robert Goulding, Ph.D., is the winner of the Dick and Peggy Notebaert Award which honors a faculty member or administrator who has had a significant impact on graduate studies at Notre Dame. Since 2016, Goulding has been the director of the Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), and since 2017 the director of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, of which HPS is a part. In those roles, he has demonstrated outstanding thoughtfulness and creativity in meeting program-specific challenges and in innovating new support structures for graduate students. These include: creation of the Reilly Center Fellowship, an award allowing top-tier Ph.D. students the opportunity to pursue additional study or research at outside universities in the early stages of their dissertation; building a new concentration within the HPS curricula; attracting additional faculty to HPS; and revamping a weekly student reading group colloquium into a forum focused on presentations and discussions about the work of HPS scholars.

Susanna De Stradis ’22, Ph.D. from the Department of History, is the recipient of the Shaheen Award in the Humanities. De Stradis is an award-winning historian of religion whose widely published scholarly work has upended and reframed traditional understandings of the complex interplay between American Catholicism, democratic values, notions of religious freedom, and mid-twentieth-century Vatican authorities. In fall 2020, De Stradis was among the first cohort of scholars to access the newly available records of Pope Pius XII’s pontificate (1939–1958) at the Vatican Archives. Her findings in Rome received a great deal of attention from scholars around the world and led to significant publications in both Italian and American journals, as well as in public-facing venues such as Commonweal and The Immanent Frame. Current University provost Dr. John T. McGreevy served as De Stradis’s adviser and considers her a true rising star in the field. “Few U.S. scholars have her linguistic capacity and intellectual drive,” he said. “Virtually no one is as well positioned to deepen our understanding of both global history and global religion. Eventually, everyone at Notre Dame and the Graduate School will bask a bit in her reflected glory.” She is a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. In the fall, she will take up an appointment as assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University.

Luiz Vilaça, Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Sociology, is the recipient of the Shaheen Award in the Social Sciences. Considered a rising star in his field, sociologist and doctoral candidate Vilaça has directed his research toward explaining the causes of anti-corruption prosecutions. His remarkable success in being published — seven publications in total, with several more on the way — underscores the impact that his research has already had on the field of sociology, as well as on public policy. His mixed-methods dissertation examines the case of Operation Car Wash in Brazil, a series of anti-corruption prosecutions that resulted in the conviction of hundreds of business executives and politicians. In it, he draws on 120 interviews with prosecutors, detectives, judges, and politicians involved in corruption investigations, as well as on survey data and an original dataset of corruption cases from the Brazilian Superior Court of Justice. Erin McDonnell, co-chair on Vilaça’s dissertation, said his research brings a fresh perspective to the issue: “Luiz’s work is at the cutting edge of policy-relevant social science. He moves beyond a decades-long tradition of documenting and lamenting corruption to break new ground on analyzing what can actually be done by organizational actors to tackle corruption where it is endemic.”Following graduation, Vilaça will begin a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University. In fall 2024, he will take up an appointment as assistant professor of sociology at Bowdoin College.

Ester E. Aguirre Alfaro, M.A. candidate from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, is the winner of the Social Justice Award that is given annually to a graduate student in the Notre Dame community who has tackled complex societal issues through his or her scholarship, teaching, and service. Aguirre Alfaro has demonstrated a tireless commitment to fighting for the marginalized — in particular, immigrants and families from Latin America — both during her master’s program at Notre Dame, and in the years preceding it. She has worked for nonprofit groups in Texas to protect and advance the rights of asylum-seeking immigrants at the border and has served as an educator for underserved student populations. While at Notre Dame, Aguirre Alfaro took on a position as assistant project coordinator with the Shaw Center for Families and Children as part of its ongoing Seguimos Avanzando project, one of the largest studies of the Mexican population in the United States. In this role, she recruited families into the study, served as a bilingual assessment coordinator, and assisted in the coding of qualitative interviews about migrant experiences of discrimination and parenting. Vanesa Miseres in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, said Aguirre Alfaro has uniquely fused scholarship and service: “Ester has a distinguished profile of a student who knows how to bring her academic training to a practical sphere and serve the community.” This fall, Aguirre Alfaro will begin a doctoral program in Hispanic studies at the University of British Columbia.

Originally published by Eric Heath at graduateschool.nd.edu on May 10, 2023.

In memoriam: Jay Patrick Dolan, 87, Cushwa Center founder

2023-05-11T12:00:00-04:00

Jay Patrick Dolan, founder of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, died May 7, 2023, in Salem, Oregon. He was 87 years old.

Dolan was born on March 17, 1936, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Joseph T. and Margaret (Reardon) Dolan. He graduated from Fairfield College Preparatory School before being ordained a priest in Rome in 1961 and earning his licentiate in sacred theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in 1962. In 1966, he enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he studied under the renowned religion scholar Martin E. Marty and honed what was then a distinct approach to the history of American Catholicism, emphasizing the men and women who occupied the pews rather than the pulpits. He earned a Ph.D. in history in 1970.

“Jay Dolan’s pathbreaking mix of social and religious history marked a turn of direction for both fields,” said John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost and Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History. “The same commitment to the lives of ordinary people marked many of his initiatives as the founding director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, long the country’s premier center for such scholarship. He inspired young scholars, mentored colleagues (very much including myself), and educated generations of lucky Notre Dame undergraduates and graduate students. All of us at Notre Dame were lucky to have him in our midst, and we will all mourn his death.”

After a one-year appointment in the department of theology at the University of San Francisco, Dolan accepted a position as assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame in 1971; he subsequently gained promotion to associate professor in 1977 and full professor in 1986. In 1975, he launched the American Catholic Studies Newsletter and persuaded the university to create the Center for the Study of American Catholicism, and was named as its inaugural director in 1977.

In 1978, the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America committed perpetual funding for the center’s work, and in 1981, Dolan oversaw the center’s full endowment through the generosity of Charles and Margaret Hall Cushwa of Youngstown, Ohio. In the years to come, he guided research and publication projects, developed a series of travel and research grants and postdoctoral fellowships for scholars of Catholicism, and hosted regular lectures and conferences, most notably the semiannual Seminar in American Religion. Together, these initiatives established the center as the leading institutional home for the historical and interdisciplinary study of Roman Catholicism in the United States. He ultimately served as the center’s director for 16 years, stepping down from that role in 1993.

Dolan authored a number of foundational texts in the field of American Catholic studies, including The Immigrant Church: New York Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865 (Johns Hopkins, 1975), winner of the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Gilmary Shea Prize in 1976; Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience, 1830–1900 (Notre Dame, 1978); The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday, 1985); and In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (Oxford, 2002). In addition, he edited several projects, including the two-volume The American Catholic Parish: A History from 1850 to the Present (Paulist, 1987) and the three-volume Notre Dame History of Hispanic Catholics (Notre Dame, 1994).

“Jay Dolan almost single-handedly shifted the focus of Catholic historiography to the lives of ordinary immigrants in all their ethnic, racial, and social diversity—their families and parishes, ‘neighborhood gods’ and cultural rituals, internal conflicts and eventual assimilation into a mainstream American society which, collectively, they transformed,” said R. Scott Appleby, Dolan’s successor at the Cushwa Center and now the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs and professor of history. “His magnum opus, The American Catholic Experience, is a monumental synthesis of the groundbreaking research of a generation of social historians—many of whom Jay drew into the growing Cushwa Center network. A ‘people’s history,’ it was among the first and by far the most influential reinterpretation of American Catholic history in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Jay was a mentor, a valued colleague, and a dear friend. With many others whose lives he touched, I will miss him.”

Charles B. Cushwa III and Jay P. Dolan on the campus of Notre Dame during a conference sponsored by the Cushwa Center, c. 1990.

A busy publication schedule did not distract Dolan from the classroom, where he instructed Notre Dame undergraduates in legendary classes such as The Irish-American Experience. He also directed a number of doctoral students and mentored a new generation of scholars through the Cushwa Center’s programs and outreach. Along the way, he held visiting appointments at institutions including Princeton University, University College Cork, Boston College, and the University of Chicago, and he won distinguished prizes and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Catholic Historical Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Lilly Endowment. His scholarly achievements positioned him to interpret the American Catholic experience for a mass readership: outlets such as the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post sought his analysis for their religion reporting, and his reviews featured regularly in The New York Times during the 1990s.

Dolan retired in 2003, after which he remained active as a scholar and author, including the publication of The Irish Americans: A History (Bloomsbury, 2008). He continued to be an avid golfer and active member of Knollwood Country Club in Granger, Indiana, and Vero Beach Country Club in Florida, and he was also involved in numerous volunteer ministries, including with the Center for the Homeless in downtown South Bend, the Holy Cross Care and Rehabilitation Center, the Indian River Medical Center in Vero Beach, the VNA Hospice of Indian River County, and the Arc of Indian River County, an organization devoted to serving individuals with special needs.

“Jay showed me how to teach and write history, how to do research, and how to support other scholars through the Cushwa Center. I learned from him that all of this work was critically important, and that it required time and patience to do it well,” said Cushwa Center director Kathleen Sprows Cummings.“Perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned from Jay, though, was that no matter how vital and significant our historical work was, when it came to building a happy and successful life, professional commitments mattered far less than caring for family, cultivating deep friendships, and giving back to the community. He did all of those things exceptionally well. I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor and friend, and his death saddens me beyond measure.”

Dolan is survived by two children, Patrick J. Dolan (Ingrid) of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Mark M. Dolan (Jacque) of Salem, Oregon, along with two grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife, Patricia McNeal Dolan, in 2018.

A funeral Mass will be held at 9:30 a.m. June 16, 2023, at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame, followed by burial at Cedar Grove Cemetery.

To share memories of Jay and condolences for family and friends, visit dignitymemorial.com.

Feature image: Jay P. Dolan at the University of Notre Dame in 2015 for the 40th anniversary celebration of the Cushwa Center's founding.

Originally published by Cushwa Center at cushwa.nd.edu on May 11, 2023.

Economist Eva Dziadula and team develop tool for visualizing, predicting global migration

2023-05-11T07:54:00-04:00

Global migration is accelerating and bringing with it new challenges. One Notre Dame economist is designing digital tools to help students, scholars, leaders, and nations visualize migration and prepare for it more effectively.

A visualization of the immigration patterns of highly skilled workers. Darker shades of green indicate higher levels of immigration. Hashed texture indicates incomplete data.

Researchers often study the flow of things like rivers, electricity, or blood. Eva Dziadula studies the flow of something very different: people. A teaching professor in the University of Notre Dame's Department of Economics, Dziadula works to identify and understand patterns in migration.

Global migration is accelerating and bringing with it new challenges. In 2020, 281 million people migrated away from their home country—a 62% increase from 20 years ago. As a result of this acceleration, more people than at any point in history are living in a country in which they were not born.

In 2015, a sudden influx of refugees from Syria led to a humanitarian crisis at the borders of several European countries. The same year, many migrants from Africa and the Middle East arrived in Italy and Greece to find critical shortages of shelter, food, education, and work.

The key to solving these problems, Dziadula says, is better prediction. But modeling migration patterns in a world of 8 billion people across nearly 200 separate nations is a daunting task that requires several different types of expertise.

Eva Dziadula

With support from the National Science Foundation, Dziadula partnered with Paul Brenner, a professor of the practice and the senior associate director of Notre Dame’s Center for Research Computing (CRC). Dziadula and Brenner were joined by three student researchers: John O’Hare and Marie Clay in the CRC as well as Carl Colglazier, a Ph.D. student in Technology and Social Behavior at Northwestern University.

Together, the team created the first-ever open source tool for visualizing and predicting global migration. The tool allows users to simulate shocks, obtain estimates, and visualize the impact. By simulating global flows of migrants, it could help researchers and policymakers prepare more proactively for migration.

The basic economic premise that guides the tool is simple: People will migrate when and where the benefits of migrating outweigh the costs. But translating this simple economic logic into a model requires complex calculation. Some costs and benefits are obvious. Travel expenses are an obvious cost. The potential for higher wages is an obvious benefit. But often, the costs and benefits are more subtle. Dziadula and her team built a model that includes a wide array of factors to model both costs and benefits. It includes not just monetary losses and gains but also factors like the loss of family and community connections, the difficulty of learning a new language, the destination country’s openness to immigration, and political freedoms migrants can expect to find when they arrive.

Dziadula uses this model regularly in her Economics of Immigration class. Her students are exposed to the Python programming language and are tasked with altering the parameters of the economics model based on hypothetical shocks to foreign economies, then interpreting the model’s prediction of future flows of migrants.

Eva Dziadula works with students at the Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla (UPAEP) in Puebla, Mexico.

Dziadula recently taught a workshop on Women in Migration at the Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla (UPAEP), a Catholic university in Puebla, Mexico, where she unveiled the team’s interactive visualization tool to actively engage students with the theoretical models she discussed.

The tool will eventually be available online and will be free to access for anyone with an internet connection and a standard internet browser. This level of accessibility, the researchers say, will help the tool have a positive impact while also enabling other researchers to build on their work.

“Global migration is one of the defining issues of our time," said Dziadula. "We are pleased that through this collaboration, we have been able to develop a tool that gives us a better visualization of what global migration looks like. It allows users to interactively see the impact of different events on global migration flows so they can see what happens when they change the importance of certain factors. It is a practical teaching tool that brings theoretical math models to life and deepens students' understanding.”

Contact:

Brett Beasley / Writer and Editorial Program Manager

Notre Dame Research / University of Notre Dame

bbeasle1@nd.edu / 574.631.8183

research.nd.edu / @UNDResearch

About Notre Dame Research:

The University of Notre Dame is a private research and teaching university inspired by its Catholic mission. Located in South Bend, Indiana, its researchers are advancing human understanding through research, scholarship, education, and creative endeavor in order to be a repository for knowledge and a powerful means for doing good in the world. For more information, please see research.nd.edu or @UNDResearch.

Originally published by Brett Beasley at research.nd.edu on May 09, 2023.

Design professor helps coordinate project celebrating underrepresented baseball teams from South Bend’s past

2023-05-10T15:37:00-04:00

Thomas “Detour” Evans working on a mural at Foundry Field.

A groundbreaking ceremony will be held 4-6 p.m. Friday, May 12, for Foundry Field, a proposed public-access baseball field designed to celebrate the Foundry Giants and other underrepresented baseball teams from South Bend’s past. The event at Southeast Park in South Bend will feature free food, games and prizes for the public.

Foundry Field is a collaborative community project led by the Sappy Moffitt Field Foundation, the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns, the Indiana University South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center and the City of South Bend Venues Parks and Arts.

The project’s four primary objectives are to increase interest in baseball through programming, history, art and public access; increase access to baseball through partnerships with the Boys and Girls Clubs of St. Joseph County and the South Bend Community School Corp.; revitalize the Southeast Neighborhood, a largely working-class neighborhood south of downtown; and preserve and promote underrepresented teams and individuals from South Bend’s baseball and softball history.

“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, an associate professor of design at Notre Dame who is helping to coordinate the project. “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.”

As proposed, the field will feature a full-size diamond bordered by the elevated railroad tracks at the southeast corner of Southeast Park. It will include a grass infield, dirt base paths, a net-and-steel-pole backstop, an irrigation system and a living hedge outfield fence. Future additions may include a covered vintage grandstand, covered dugouts, a scorebooth with a PA system and a public pavilion. The field will be home to the South Bend-based Sappy Moffitt Baseball League, an adult recreational league, and will also be used for youth baseball through the school corporation and the Boys & Girls Clubs.

Thomas “Detour” Evans at Foundry Field

In addition to the field, the project calls for a series of murals and historical markers along the left and center field walls (technically, the retaining wall on the south side of the elevated tracks) that tell the story of the Foundry Giants and other teams and individuals important to South Bend baseball and softball history. Additional information and materials will be available on the Foundry Field website.

Students in Assistant Teaching Professor Katherine Walden’s fall 2022 Baseball and America course led historical research on the Giants.

“Learning is most impactful when students are able to put the conversations we’re having into context, and research is going to be most transformative when it’s done in community,” Walden said. “This class and this project represent the best of all those worlds in so many ways. It was deeply moving to see students recognize that and make those connections through their work.”

The murals will be completed as part of a series of one-week artist residencies, starting with Denver-based artist, innovator and educator Thomas “Detour” Evans, whose work includes a Jackie Robinson mural in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a Baltimore Orioles mural in Baltimore.

Evans will be working at the site this week to complete the Foundry Giants mural and to interact with students from the Boys & Girls Clubs, Riley High School and the Notre Dame design program, who will be contributing to sections of the mural adorning part of the center field wall. Evans will also be on-hand at the groundbreaking to visit with organizers, students and community members.

Active during the 1920s, the Giants were a predominantly Black baseball team whose players typically worked in the Studebaker Foundry. The team included several players who went on to play in the Negro Leagues.

The Sappy Moffitt Field Foundation is a nonprofit organization established to develop Foundry Field with support from the Notre Dame Center for Social Concerns; Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority; South Bend Venues, Parks and Arts; South Bend Community School Corp.; Indiana University South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center; Southeast Organized Area Residents; and The History Museum. It is associated with the Sappy Moffitt Baseball League, an adult, wood-bat baseball league established in 2013.

For more information, visit foundryfield.org.

Originally published by Erin Blasko and Carrie Gates at news.nd.edu on May 10, 2023.

Schreffler wins Society of Architectural Historians book award for research on colonialization’s impact on Peruvian city

2023-05-04T08:00:00-04:00

Michael Schreffler, a Notre Dame professor of art history and the College of Arts & Letters’ associate dean for the arts.

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.

“In a way, it’s like Rome, in that you see the layers of history — multiple periods of history through architecture that is still visible,” said Schreffler, a Notre Dame professor of art history and the College of Arts & Letters’ associate dean for the arts. “Why do you see so much of that in a city that was invaded and settled by the Spanish 500 years ago?”

Schreffler holding his award with Patricia Morton, president of the Society of Architectural Historians. Photo by Luigi D'Astolfo

Schreffler’s first trip to Cuzco 21 years ago — and about 10 subsequent visits — provided the spark for his 2020 book, Cuzco: Incas, Spaniards, and the Making of a Colonial City, which has now won the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.

The award is named for a University of California, Berkeley professor who served as president of SAH in the 1970s. Kostof’s interdisciplinary research was considered novel at the time. He wrote about cities’ infrastructure and architecture, while also informing readers about their settings for human interaction and ritual practices.

“That is the approach I took in my book, so I’m grateful for this recognition named for a person who broke ground in this field,” said Schreffler, who received the honor at a ceremony this month in Montreal. “It validates doing this kind of work and makes me excited that other people who read the book found it interesting and were able to connect a bigger world of ideas to the history of architecture.”

Schreffler’s book addresses how Cuzco transformed after the Spanish invasion in the 1530s. Today, the city is best known as the place where tourists spend time before traveling to Machu Picchu.

While previous research has covered the overall Spanish conquest of Peru, Schreffler wanted “to take a look at that story from the vantage point of one city, arguably the most important city in the Inca Empire in this period,” he said.

The city didn’t experience the destruction seen elsewhere — beautiful, distinctive stone carvings and other examples of Inca architecture remain, while Aztec architecture in Mexico City was erased.

The key, he said, was the way space was repurposed in Cuzco while its cultural reality was forever changing.

“When I teach this material in my classes, I like to ask students, ‘What can we say about long-term consequences of Spanish colonialism in a place like this?’ One of them has to do with the social dimensions of geography. The Spanish government established itself in Lima while Cuzco and its environs were populated largely by Quechua-speaking Andean peoples,” he said, referencing the language of the Incas.

“The social inequalities in Peru today and, in particular, discrimination against speakers of Quechua has its origin in the colonial period. But the visible remains of Inca architecture in Cuzco remind us that the city’s transformation over time is not simply a story of loss. It is also a story of resilience.”

“I’m grateful for this recognition named for a person who broke ground in this field. It validates doing this kind of work and makes me excited that other people who read the book found it interesting and were able to connect a bigger world of ideas to the history of architecture.”

Sociologists Haskins and Mittleman find paternal incarceration complicates college plans for Black youth

2023-04-28T07:00:00-04:00

Most Gen Z people are characterized as ambitious and forward-thinking, believing all things are possible. But what if you are a teen whose father is, or has been, in prison? How does that affect your outlook on life? How does that affect your optimism in regard to going to college and completing your degree?

Anna Haskins

University of Notre Dame professors Anna Haskins, the Andrew V. Tackes Associate Professor of Sociology and associate director of Notre Dame’s Initiative on Race and Resilience, and Joel Mittleman, assistant professor of sociology, along with the University of Maryland’s Wade Jacobsen, used data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) to determine how 15-year-old children of incarcerated fathers view their own educational futures.

In the study, “Optimism and Obstacles: Racialized Constraints in College Attitudes and Expectations Among Teens of the Prison Boom,” recently published in the journal Sociology of Education, the researchers found that although teens with incarcerated fathers were optimistic about their futures and fully committed to the importance of a college degree, they had lower expectations of actually completing college — and this was especially true for impacted Black youth.

Of the 3,205 youth who responded to the FFCWS survey, about 60% of the teens in the sample who experienced paternal incarceration reported that college graduation is very likely, an additional 37% reported it as being somewhat likely and 3% said it was unlikely.

The researchers said their findings point to the complexity of contemporary teens’ college-related attitudes in the wake of the “prison boom,” the era of mass incarceration in the United States between 1970 and 2010. This 40-year period has resulted in nearly half of Americans reporting that they have had an immediate family member in prison or jail, including more than 2 million children who currently have an incarcerated parent and 10 million children who have had a parent imprisoned at some point in their lives.

Joel Mittleman

Scholars estimate that 1 in 4 Black children, 1 in 10 Latino children and 1 in 25 white children experience parental incarceration by their early teens, the study said. The researchers’ work focused primarily on incarcerated fathers because 93% of incarcerated parents are men.

“This research looks at a sample of children that I have followed since they were born,” Haskins said. “I have looked at the impact of a father’s incarceration on them at age 3, 5, 9 and now 15. We know the effects on them as children, but we wanted to see if — and how — those effects continue. And what we’re seeing is that the effects continue to persist into early adulthood.”

Mittleman added that research has already shown that parental incarceration has negative impacts on children’s academic performance beginning at a very young age. “What our study shows is that — even after taking all of those negative impacts into account — the stigma of incarceration itself seems to limit the kind of academic future that Black teens can imagine for themselves,” he said.

Haskins said most education research focuses on the tangible consequences of parental incarceration, such as graduation rates and GPAs. “This study examined the psychosocial measures — in other words, how might parental imprisonment impact the way in which teens see their future,” she said.

“Because our criminal legal system is so racialized, it’s not surprising to find this sort of calibrating downward of one’s expectations for oneself,” Haskins said. “But this limits [the student’s] potential and truncates the educational trajectory for this next generation of young people, without them having done anything wrong. And that’s not what we want for them as a society.

“The spillover stigma of familial incarceration can be very stunting for young people,” Haskins said. “And when you think about it, a college education has massive implications for social mobility and later success in life.”

The impacts of the prison boom are long-lasting, Haskins said, and are influencing more consequential educational life decisions. She suggested two things to help reduce that impact: further research and additional resources targeted toward the most impacted populations.

“The spillover stigma of familial incarceration can be very stunting for young people. And when you think about it, a college education has massive implications for social mobility and later success in life.”

— Anna Haskins

“We need to encourage more research to be done that considers the role of the criminal legal system and how it impacts educational trajectories,” Haskins said. “And if we have Black students with an incarcerated parent, then high school or college counselors can do a little more work in trying to shore up other avenues or other types of support that can bolster them, to help them see their educational futures differently.”

This is something Haskins hopes her research — and further research — can do to help encourage the next generation of college-bound students, regardless of what their parents have done or their time spent in prison.

“Our Notre Dame mission of advancing justice and addressing inequality — walking with those that are struggling — is truly important to me,” Haskins said. “It speaks to families that are touched by the criminal legal system in all of their humanity.”

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, assistant director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Tracy DeStazio at news.nd.edu on April 27, 2023.

Psychologist Mark Cummings, inaugural A&L Research Achievement Award winner, lauded for a career focused on how families function and boosting their resilience

2023-04-27T12:00:00-04:00

E. Mark Cummings

The numbers alone are remarkable.

Notre Dame psychologist E. Mark Cummings has secured $40 million in grant funding to conduct ground-breaking research. He’s produced 366 publications — including 13 books, 279 journal articles, and 58 chapters in scholarly volumes. Other scholars have cited his findings more than 50,000 times. And his curriculum vitae is 67 pages — without including any of his presentations over the past 20 years.

“That would make it too long,” he said with a laugh.

In honor of his long track record of accomplishments as a scholar, the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Professor of Psychology has been named the inaugural winner of the College of Arts & Letters Research Achievement Award.

The honor recognizes a tenured faculty member who demonstrates significant scholarly achievement and impact, as well as leadership, extraordinary innovation, and engagement with the University’s research and educational mission. Cummings will receive the award at the A&L spring faculty meeting at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 2, in McKenna Hall, at which Jean Porter, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology, will receive the inaugural College of Arts & Letters Graduate Student Mentorship Award.

After the event, Cummings will probably go back to work — as director of the Family Studies Lab, he’s simultaneously involved with multiple externally funded research projects, including many supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). His mantra is a slight variation of Nike’s famous “Just do it” slogan.

“I have work to do,” he said, “and I do it.”

‘I kept pushing ahead’

For Cummings, though, success as a researcher wasn’t immediate.

His grant-writing skills took awhile to develop — during his first two years at Notre Dame, and 10 years before that, none of his research proposals to the NIH were funded.

“I was getting turned down every single time,” he said.

The rejections, though, didn’t faze him. In fact, he learned how to develop strong research proposals by serving for many years as an NIH grant reviewer.

“A long time ago, I stopped worrying about a lack of success. I kept pushing ahead,” he said. “If I feel passionate about something, I have a sense that it will work out eventually, and I keep pursuing it.”

The field of psychology is fortunate that he did; much of his work has centered on the emotional security theory that he developed with Patrick Davies, then his graduate student at West Virginia University and now a professor at the University of Rochester. The theory stipulates that family relationships beyond that of the mother and child — inter-parental, father-child, and sibling relationships — also are important to children’s adjustment and well-being.

“First, we need to understand relationships empirically, research-wise, then translate the findings about what is important into treatment programs. We need to take evidence and translate it into intervention.”

For decades, he’s been focused on examining how families function and devising ways to best support children and families.

“First, we need to understand relationships empirically, research-wise, then translate the findings about what is important — for example, the emotional security of children and families — into treatment programs,” he said. “We need to take evidence and translate it into intervention.”

In her nomination letter, Department of Psychology chair Cindy Bergeman wrote that she couldn’t imagine a better recipient than Cummings for the award.

In addition to being internationally recognized for his valuable contributions to psychology, Bergeman wrote, Cummings is a prolific and influential scholar who “has extraordinary grant-writing skills, is supportive of junior scholars at all levels (undergrad, graduate, postdoctoral, and junior faculty), and is a role model for others in the department starting their research careers.”

‘Every context is different’

When he became a fellow with the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Cummings began thinking about how community conflict affects children and family functioning — and his international research and projects now include work with children and families in Italy, China, Spain, Chile, Wales, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Honduras, Iran, Israel, and Palestine.

In one of his current projects, he’s collaborating with associate professor Laura Miller-Graff. They developed a sustainable, evidence- and culturally based intervention program to strengthen the mental health of parents and children, and fortify emotional security and healthy communication for Palestinian families experiencing ongoing conflict in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Cummings leads a class discussion in 2010.

In the pilot program, Palestinian youth demonstrated significant improvement in adjustment problems, resilience and security within the family. And, parents were better able to regulate their emotions, which was associated with lower levels of depression.

Cummings said the need for such interventions for children and families — in the United States and worldwide — is staggering.

“The United Nations estimates there are 1 billion children exposed to political violence in the world at any one time, and there’s almost no work toward understanding that, beyond documenting the negative impact on children,” he said. “Little is known about how or why children are affected, and therefore there’s limited basis for developing effective interventions to help children and families amidst political violence and war.”

So Cummings seeks to continue expanding the scope of what, how, and where he can contribute. He’s looking to explore projects in Ukraine, Nigeria, as well as with gangs in the U.S. and Honduras. “Every context is different,” he said, “and we need to adapt intervention programs to the context.”

He became fascinated with psychology in an undergraduate class with Mary Ainsworth at Johns Hopkins University, an innovative researcher of attachment theory. The theory, which posits that a strong emotional bond between mother and child is essential to development, was a major departure from what other psychologists thought at the time: that attachment was based on rewards-reinforcement.

“This really resonated with me,” he said. “I grew up a Navy brat. My dad was in the Navy, and we moved a lot. My mother died when I was 5, so we had a lot of transitions and relationship challenges, so this was interesting to me.”

“Notre Dame is a positive, supportive environment and is dedicated to excellence. I appreciate that. The emphasis is on quality of work, being innovative, and making a difference. I think that’s been a big factor in my success here.”

‘Dedicated to excellence’

Cummings’ research centered on relationships and conflict, and his desire to help others through his work, have been acknowledged before. In 2017, Cummings won the American Psychology Association's Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology, for bettering the condition of children and families.

Bergeman said Cummings continues to be a dynamic contributor at all levels, and does not rest on his considerable laurels.

“Beyond all his accomplishments, he is a wonderful departmental citizen,” she wrote, “always willing to roll up his sleeves and contribute to the betterment of the University.”

For Cummings, the University has been an ideal place to pursue his research.

“Notre Dame is a positive, supportive environment and is dedicated to excellence. I appreciate that,” he said. “The emphasis is on quality of work, being innovative, and making a difference. I think that’s been a big factor in my success here.”

Theology professor Jean Porter, inaugural Graduate Student Mentorship Award winner, takes positive, personal approach to transforming students into scholars

2023-04-25T08:00:00-04:00

Jean Porter

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 at the University of Notre Dame 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.

The honor recognizes a tenured faculty member who has demonstrated outstanding scholarly mentorship and care for doctoral or MFA students, and will be presented to Porter at the A&L spring faculty meeting at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 2, in McKenna Hall. E. Mark Cummings, the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Professor of Psychology, will receive the inaugural Arts & Letters Research Achievement Award at the event as well.

‘A special charism’

Elisabeth Rain Kincaid, now the Legendre-Soulé Chair in Business Ethics and director of the Center for Ethics and Economic Justice at Loyola University New Orleans, completed her dissertation under Porter in 2018. She credits Porter for continually giving doctoral students care and attention as they forge their way through years of research and writing.

“All her students believe that she has a special charism as an advisor of helping us figure out the best and clearest way to say what we had always wanted to say but couldn’t figure out how to express or communicate,” Kincaid wrote in recommending Porter for the award. “Whereas some dissertation directors may seek to impose their own personality, ideas, or style, Jean’s goal is always to make each of us better scholars in the way most appropriate to each of our scholarly natures — rather than making us into mini-images of herself.”

“Jean’s goal is always to make each of us better scholars in the way most appropriate to each of our scholarly natures — rather than making us into mini-images of herself.”

A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1990, Porter earned her Ph.D. from Yale University and holds an M.Div. from the Weston School of Theology and a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. She is considered a leading scholar in moral theology and Christian ethics, and in 2012 she was inducted into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published widely, including six books — including her most recent, Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective (2016), and Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theology of Legal Authority, which won the Catholic Press Association Book Award in 2011.

When mentoring her doctoral students, Porter said, she gets to know her students “really, really, really well.” She learns how their minds work and what their interests are along with something about their personal circumstances and their lives outside of graduate school. She listens to them, reads what they write, and always offers guidance whenever they ask, whether during a formal meeting in her office or a quick chat on a campus sidewalk.

“There’s no substitute for taking time with them,” she said, “talking to them about where they want to go, and getting a feeling for what they can do and what they can do well.”

‘She has made all the difference’

Writing is central to doctoral work, and Porter keeps her students focused by reminding them to sit down and do it. Although she now writes more quickly, progressing on drafts of articles and chapters whenever she gets a few moments in the day, she once labored over her writing, agonizingly crafting one sentence at a time.

Because of the strong relationships she develops with her students, she knows they trust her as she critiques their drafts with positive suggestions instead of negative criticism.

“Feedback on students’ writing can be all kinds of things,” Porter said. “I can help them be more scholarly, if that’s needed — and at the beginning, it usually is, even for the best students. But I can also help them try to figure out what it is exactly they want to say, and that involves usually going back and talking about what got them interested in the project in the first place.”

Mary Hirschfeld

Former student Mary Hirschfeld began pursuing a Ph.D. in theology at Notre Dame after already completing a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard and working as an economist for 15 years. She struggled with finding the focus of her new dissertation until Porter suggested she build on her previous career by integrating economics with theology.

Hirschfeld began “painstaking scholarly excavation” by concentrating on the conversations of 18th- and 19th-century theologians about political economy. Her progress was slow, however, so to prove she was being productive, she showed Porter a paper she had written for an academic conference.

A few days later, Porter called to point out that the paper integrating Aquinas’s thought and economics was Hirschfeld’s dissertation proposal.

“I owe Jean a lot for having the wisdom to see clearly what skills I have and what contributions I might make,” Hirschfeld, now an associate professor of theology at Notre Dame, wrote in her letter of recommendation. “She has made all the difference for me.”

“I owe Jean a lot for having the wisdom to see clearly what skills I have and what contributions I might make. She has made all the difference for me.”

‘I watch them turn into scholars’

After more than three decades at Notre Dame, Porter continues to value the University’s commitment to teaching — she fills her class schedule not only with graduate courses, but also routinely teaches undergraduates in Foundations of Theology.

After being named to Notre Dame’s All-Faculty Team, Porter was honored on the field at a football game and featured in this ad in the gameday program.

Teaching, she said with a shrug, is what she was born to do, tracing her love for the classroom to her mother, who was a high school forensics speech and debate teacher.

“It’s the best life I could imagine,” Porter said. “There’s something really powerful about this kind of involvement in another person’s mind. I watch them make connections. I watch them turn into scholars.”

She’s played a part in that transformation for many, especially ones who go on to teach at Catholic universities or seminaries. In recommending Porter for the award, Timothy Matovina, chair of the Department of Theology, and Joseph Wawrykow, a professor of theology and former director of graduate studies, noted that of the six most recent hires in moral theology at The Catholic University of America, four were Porter’s students. And many more hold tenured or tenure-track appointments at other major universities.

“Brilliant and no-nonsense, Jean is also caring and compassionate, utterly dedicated to her students,” Wawrykow wrote in their joint letter. “Jean Porter has set the standard for graduate mentoring in her long and distinguished time at our University, and her example has been inspirational for us all.”

A Q&A with Roy Scranton about climate change, Notre Dame’s Environmental Humanities Initiative, and ‘ethical pessimism’

2023-04-21T07:07:00-04:00

Roy Scranton is an associate professor of English, director of the Creative Writing Program, and founding director of the University’s Environmental Humanities Initiative. A novelist, essayist and climate philosopher, he is the author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. As we approach Earth Day, he reflects on why the humanities are essential to addressing climate change — and how the initiative’s efforts support the Notre Dame mission.

What does the Environmental Humanities Initiative encompass?

We’re doing a lot of great work with the Environmental Humanities Initiative. One of the keystone things is the Witnessing Climate Change course. It’s a large public-facing, writing-intensive course that I developed through a teaching lab fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. We had our first iteration last year, and we’re going to run it again this fall and plan to run it every year. That’s been very successful so far. We’re also thinking about where it might go in the future and how we can support interdisciplinary graduate student work; build an engaging, innovative curriculum in the environmental humanities, particularly addressing climate change; and foster programming and conversation on campus.

Why are the humanities important in addressing climate change?

The initiative is working to articulate and make visible for people again and again that while we often think of climate change as a technical issue or a science issue, it’s not just that. Not at all. It is a science issue, but it’s also a political issue, and it’s a social issue. It’s a human issue.

We can talk about it in the context of Pope Francis’ Laudato si’ encyclical and the idea of integral ecology, but we also need to talk about the human cost and human impact of climate change — not just in the future, although the future is coming fast, but right now, with climate refugees and immigrants from Central America and from the Middle East and refugee populations’ displacement and impact on infrastructure and quality of life.

All of the mission-related and ethical issues that are at the heart of Catholic social teaching at our University are only heightened and made more manifest by the problem of climate change. We think homelessness is bad — but what about homelessness when there’s 5 inches of rain in one day? Or when it’s 108 degrees out? It exacerbates every problem. And if we don’t start thinking about it now, in forward-looking, adaptive ways, it’s going to be unmanageable. We need to be thinking now about how to live ethically in a world of catastrophe.

Why is Notre Dame the right place to be leading this effort?

It’s the right place because of the long tradition here of educating the whole student, thinking about character and the concern with Catholic ethics and the social mission of the University. You know, a lot of places say these kinds of things. But my sense with Notre Dame is that it’s not just rhetoric, it’s actually deeply imbued into the yellow bricks of the buildings, the character of the faculty and administration, and just the culture of the University. It’s a strange time for higher education in this country, particularly for the humanities. But I think Notre Dame is an exception because of its commitment to deep thought and spiritual reflection. And that happens not just through reflecting on religious scriptures, but also on accounts of spiritual striving and failures and efforts to think through the human dilemma — from St. Augustine to Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement to Barry Lopez, who is a great exemplar of the Notre Dame spirit.

What do you hope students take away from the Witnessing Climate Change course?

The idea of Witnessing Climate Change is that it’s about witnessing in two senses: witnessing as in seeing and understanding and internalizing, and then also witnessing as in communicating. We look at issues of climate justice and constructions of wilderness and nature, and then the students work in the second half to build a rigorously researched, creative nonfiction essay that has a narrative element. One of my favorite parts of the course is when we workshop their writing together. I have a lot of STEM students, engineering students, architecture students, and they bring their own subject matter expertise into the workshop and into their topic. And the students are teaching each other about different aspects of climate change and the broader climate crisis. My job is to help them be rigorous with their research and figure out how to frame and communicate it.

I feel like this course is a success if I can help the students understand the gravity of our situation and internalize that, because part of the problem with climate change, particularly, is that every time we look at it, it’s so huge and scary that we want to look away. So part of the challenge of the course is being able to help them sit with that in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the students or shut them off, but gives them the space to feel the fear, the grief and the worry, and then find a way to articulate that going forward.

There was a study a year or two ago that found that people just don’t talk about climate change, even when they’re concerned about it. A very small percentage of Americans have any kind of regular conversation about the issue. And so, in that respect, if students are talking about it, that’s a success.

You’re currently working on a book called Endgame: Climate Change, the Myth of Progress and Ethical Pessimism. How do you define “ethical pessimism” when it comes to climate change?

Well, most of us are optimistic by nature. And, by and large, that’s a good thing. When we’re facing an intractable and existential problem like climate change, however, that kind of collective optimism is profoundly dangerous and irresponsible. We need more people resisting that and making a space for pessimism. I argue that, actually, presuming the worst is in many ways a compassionate, resilient, responsible position.

A lot of critics of pessimism conflate it with cynicism or nihilism or fatalism. It’s none of those. The weakest form of pessimism is simply a rejection or skepticism of the optimistic promise that things are going to work out fine. A stronger form of pessimism is maybe a belief that things will work out poorly — but it’s not nihilism because to the pessimist that matters. It matters because it means people will suffer. I think one of the most substantive criticisms that pessimists can offer optimists is that optimism doesn’t take into account human suffering. Pessimism insists that we sit with that, that we sit with our failures, our limits, and sit with our delusions and the fact that things don’t always work out the way we’d like. And that can help us — not to give up or throw in the towel or assume there’s nothing we can do, but rather it helps us make better decisions about what we can do.

Originally published by Carrie Gates at news.nd.edu on April 20, 2023.