Bike south along the Link Trail, take a Transpo bus along Route 7, or drive a block past Rocco’s restaurant on South Bend Avenue, and you’ll find a building that’s more than bricks and siding. It’s the region’s newest mental health ally.

When it opens this June, the Wilma and Peter Veldman Family Psychology Clinic will expand local access to mental healthcare through a combination of research, training, and service. The clinic will significantly expand the evidence-based mental health services that Notre Dame provides to the community, while also serving as the new home of the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families and the newly launched Human Neuroimaging Center.

With three levels and 35,000 square feet of therapy rooms, labs, childcare spaces, and more, the Veldman Clinic is a grand undertaking that, through the thought and passion put into its design, feels less like a facility and more like a home.

“On campus, we tend toward these very formal buildings that are beautiful, but what we needed is a beautiful fit for the community, where people can feel comfortable,” said Jennifer Burke Lefever, the clinic’s managing director.
The clinic’s goal is to meet people where they are, and that starts before they even enter the building. Its position in the East Bank neighborhood makes the clinic a gateway to downtown South Bend, easily reached by bike, foot, bus, or car.

After passing through an accessible entrance, community members are welcomed into a lobby filled with natural light and comfy furniture. On the two-story entrance wall, there’s a large array of butterflies made from hand-painted silk scarves, designed by women at the St. Margaret’s House day center. The butterflies represent transformation, and the artwork’s curve mimics that of the St. Joseph River, as seen in the South Bend flag and the Veldman Clinic’s logo.

Beyond the lobby, design choices both distinct and subtle aim to reduce stress. Artwork across from the elevators uses patterns invoking the art of kintsugi, a Japanese pottery practice of repairing cracks with gold — a reminder that healing can create something stronger and more beautiful than before. A wall in the children’s room is covered with a nature scene made from soft felt. Wide hallways with tall ceilings reduce feelings of claustrophobia, with windows at the end of every corridor aiding visual orientation. And everything from furniture to drinking fountains was selected with wheelchair users in mind.

The clinic’s design also incorporates innovative technologies being introduced to the University for the first time. The Human Neuroimaging Center — led by Aron Barbey, the Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor of Psychology — will house an MRI machine capable of producing structural, functional, and metabolic brain imaging, driving ambitious neuroscience research. The building’s 40 therapy rooms will use a new VALT video system to securely record therapy sessions led by clinical psychology graduate students, so supervisors will be able to review sessions on demand.

“One of our studies will use every floor of the Veldman Clinic,” said Kaylin Hill, an assistant professor of psychology.

Hill’s research focuses on understanding reward and emotion and how they relate to clinical disorders like major depression. She often uses psychophysiological tools, such as an electroencephalogram (EEG), which tracks brain signals through electrodes placed on the scalp. The Veldman Clinic’s EEG setups and interview rooms will help her conduct research outside of her lab in Corbett Family Hall, which is less accessible for the families she works with.

The long-held dream of a psychology clinic finally became a reality through support from leadership at Notre Dame and the College of Arts & Letters, as well as the generosity of multiple Veldman family foundations, including those of Sharon and Matt Edmonds, Connie and Mike Joines, and Anita and Tom Veldman. But Burke Lefever and Kristin Valentino, the clinic’s director and a professor of psychology, knew it wouldn’t be successful without significant input from community partners who have long worked in the area.

Those partners include Oaklawn, a provider of mental health services and addiction treatment; Beacon Community Impact, the public health arm of Beacon Health Systems; and the CASIE Center, which works to prevent child abuse and support survivors. All three are located within blocks of the Veldman Clinic.

“We have a role to play within the system that is already in place, so we need close collaboration with community partners to ensure we are adding value and addressing needs rather than recreating something that already exists,” Valentino said.

A strong internal team of about 20 staff across the Veldman Clinic, Shaw Center, and Human Neuroimaging Center are essential to supporting the research of faculty and graduate students and the services they provide.

Staff clinicians, including a licensed clinical social worker, are joining the clinic to expand the amount and types of care the University can provide. In the past, the Notre Dame Department of Psychology has only offered clinical services provided by graduate students who are training to become psychologists and are supervised by faculty.

With licensed clinicians adding to the students’ work, the number of clinical care and impact hours annually provided by Notre Dame is projected to increase from 8,000 to 27,000. The clinic’s impact will be even wider as graduate students earn their doctorates and start their own practices, and as evidence-based interventions developed through research are implemented in community settings throughout the region and across the country.

Every person working at the clinic has a role to play in fulfilling the clinic’s mission. The administrative coordinator, who welcomes visitors at the front desk, is trained in de-escalation tactics, ready to be a mental health crisis first responder. Data managers, community liaisons, the Office of Information Technology, facilities teams, research assistants, and other professionals will also contribute to the clinic’s work, adding to the countless hours already put in by architects, designers, and project managers.

“It definitely takes a team across the entire campus to make it all happen,” said Heidi Miller, assistant director for staff management and operations at the clinic. “We all believe in what we’re doing, and that’s what makes it work.”

Originally published by Adah McMillan at ndworks.nd.edu on May 04, 2026.

One day a few years ago, Jeff Harden set out to do something different — complete a research project alone.

And it hasn’t been pretty.

“It has been a very painful process,” Harden said. “It's almost been like using a lawnmower that needs to be oiled really badly.”

Although the work has been arduous, it has also been deeply validating to the Andrew J. McKenna Family College Professor of Political Science because it proved that his preferred collaborative method is, indeed, the right one.

“With solo work, you are counting on yourself to do all aspects of a paper,” he said. “I know I have the basic tools that I need to do this, but everything seems harder than it should be — it's so strange for me.”

The core of Harden’s research on American politics involves applying statistical methodology to examine how legislative institutions affect representation. And during his decade at the University of Notre Dame, he has worked collaboratively with colleagues, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students on award-winning papers, presentations, and books — combining diverse interests and approaches to answer simple yet broad questions with intricate nuances such as examining voter ID laws’ effects on legislators, politicians’ accountability post-January 6, and even Taylor Swift ticket sales.

"Beyond our collaboration, he’s very generous with his time — always willing to offer feedback and advice at any stage in the research process, and my work is stronger because of it.”

— Erin Rossiter, the Nancy Reeves Dreux Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science

“Collaborating with Jeff was a valuable experience,” said Erin Rossiter, the Nancy Reeves Dreux Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, who worked with Harden on a project examining how Swift’s “Eras Tour” concert ticket sale debacle galvanized voters to hold elected officials accountable. “Our discussions about how to clearly frame our question, build our argument, and do careful empirical work have shaped how I approach my own projects. Beyond our collaboration, he’s very generous with his time — always willing to offer feedback and advice at any stage in the research process, and my work is stronger because of it.”

In recognition of his work, Harden is the recipient of the 2026 College of Arts & Letters Research Award. The honor recognizes faculty who demonstrate significant scholarly achievement and impact, as well as leadership, innovation, and engagement with the University’s research and educational mission.

The award will be presented to Harden at the College’s fall faculty meeting in September. Kasey Buckles, the Quinn and Jean Stepan Family College Professor of Economics, will receive the Graduate Student Mentorship Award at the same event.

“I don’t really see myself as a solo researcher, so this award feels like it’s recognizing a lot of people,” Harden said. “The work I’ve been doing, especially the last five years, has been exclusively collaborative, and the large majority of that with people at Notre Dame."

Tackling big questions together

Harden’s research ethos began to intertwine with his sense of community while he was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Initially interested in congressional campaigns, Harden connected with mentor Tom Carsey and other political scientists who focused more on state legislatures. He then sharpened his research focus on the relationship between elected officials and their constituents.

“Just the idea that you can study 50 legislatures comparatively instead of just one was really interesting to me,” Harden said. “And it really developed this strong allegiance to the study of state legislatures, as well as the origin of my interest in collaborative work and developing community-based research.”

Harden joined Notre Dame in 2016 and, as a concurrent professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, has further honed his ability to make research-based arguments about how institutions shape legislators' behavior, using empirical evidence from across the country.

“I am deeply interested in the statistical methodology that social scientists use to make the claims that they make,” he said. “I’ve always had an interest in the tools that we use and trying to make them better, and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of thinking about how we can safely make a causal claim when we, as researchers, did not fully control the data-generating process.”

Recently, he applied those tools in research that culminated in a Journal of Politics article titled “The Legislative Legacy of Voter Identification Laws,” co-authored with then-graduate student Alejandra Campos ’23, Ph.D., and Austin Bussing of Trinity University, which explored whether voter identification laws have a polarizing effect on state legislatures.

“Methodologically, this posed huge problems because the legislatures that we're trying to study are the ones who implemented the voter ID laws,” Harden said. “So part of that work involves the methodological innovation to be able to sort out the effect of voter ID laws on legislators, independent of whatever led them to implement voter ID laws in the first place.”

This dedication to methodological rigor and scholarly collaboration is a hallmark of Harden's work, and it has not gone unnoticed. It’s this innovative approach to tackling complex issues that has consistently earned him major grants and accolades in the field.

“Just the idea that you can study 50 legislatures comparatively instead of just one was really interesting to me. And it really developed this strong allegiance to the study of state legislatures, as well as the origin of my interest in collaborative work and developing community-based research."

— Jeff Harden, the Andrew J. McKenna Family College Professor in the Department of Political Science.

In 2019, he was a part of a multidisciplinary research team that won a $1 million National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator (C-Accel) grant to create a hub that made it easier to access and analyze data from states on public policy and economic and social outcomes. He’s also received multiple honors from the American Political Science Association, including the State Politics and Policy Section’s Emerging Scholar Award in 2022, the Best Published Paper Award in 2021, and the Best Conference Paper Award in 2017. His first book, Multidimensional Democracy: A Supply and Demand Theory of Representation in American Legislatures (Cambridge University Press, 2016), won the APSA’s Virginia Gray Book Award in 2017.

Harden credits his success to tight-knit relationships with fellow political scientists who study state legislatures and Notre Dame colleagues who challenge and inspire him further. Motivation for his research is often found from American politics scholars just down the hall, he said, David Campbell, the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Politics and director of the Democracy Initiative; professor and department chair Geoff Layman; professor Christina Wolbrecht; and Matthew Hall, the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Professor of Constitutional Studies and director of the Rooney Democracy Institute.

“They've really given me inspiration to frame my work in a way that tackles big questions,” Harden said. “And they’ve challenged me to think about how my work could answer huge questions about what democracy needs to be healthy — in the U.S., or even beyond.”

Simple, yet revolutionary

To address questions surrounding legislative representation, Harden and congressional legislative scholar Rachel Porter, the Notre Dame du Lac Assistant Professor of Political Science, formed the Representation and Politics in Legislatures (RPL) Lab. Part of the Rooney Democracy Institute, the research group — comprised of Harden, Porter, professor James Curry, and several postdoctoral and graduate scholars — aims to advance the study of legislative institutions, legislators, and representation in the United States and beyond.

For Harden, the establishment of the lab offered an opportunity for organic collaboration on similar topics and fostered a sense of identity among researchers.

“It just puts some meaningful structure to graduate school for students, and for us faculty, it gives meaningful structure to our research,” Harden said. “It also kind of recreates that community that I grew up in, so to speak.”

In the spirit of that community, Harden and lab collaborators hold a pitch day at the start of every new semester, a brainstorming session in which research ideas are “thrown out to see what sticks.” For an idea to move forward, a subset of group members must be interested in pursuing it, it should be feasible to complete while current graduate students are at Notre Dame, and it should align with the group's skill set.

“I also want the lab members thinking about research that will make a big impact with experts, political practitioners, and even on public discourse about how legislative institutions play a role in the health of American democracy,” Harden said.

One of those ideas centered on whether state legislators were held accountable for supportive roles they played during the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. To identify the answer, the entire seven-member lab examined data sets ranging from legislators’ social media posts about election misinformation to those who formally signed a letter to then-Vice President Mike Pence.

What RPL researchers largely found was that legislators faced minimal accountability — only those who physically went to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 were punished by voters, parties, and/or colleagues. Their findings led to the paper “The Consequences of Elite Action Against Elections,” which was published in the British Journal of Political Science.

“I can't imagine doing that paper by myself,” Harden said. “That paper has essentially four major analyses in it, all of which could have been one paper by themselves. There's no way I would have done all of those analyses as well as they're done on my own.”

But beyond his research success, Harden said what’s been most rewarding has been being a part of graduate students’ futures and fostering a community where organic collaboration occurs — something that his mentor Carsey, who passed away in 2018, would’ve appreciated.

“I have done a lot of my career without that sounding board, without that person who really kind of brought me up in the discipline,” Harden said. “That's hard because he and I were very close. So I'm really proud that I have created a community here that I know he would’ve loved.”

Harden’s forthcoming work on his solo project, “A Falsification Framework for Investigating Observed Covariate Balance,” has been slow, steady, and, admittedly, very frustrating for him. The paper, which develops methodological tools for evaluating data generated without controlled experiments, is currently in the revise-and-resubmit process.

“The process has felt so unnatural to me,” Harden said. “What I’ve found is that working collaboratively produces better work, and it’s a more enriching and engaging process if you do it in community.”

University of Notre Dame historian Katlyn Carter has won a 2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the Carnegie Corporation of New York announced Tuesday (May 5).

Carter, an associate professor in the Department of History, was one of 24 scholars and writers from a record 381 nominees to receive the honor. The fellowship includes a two-year grant of up to $200,000 to support research for her second book, The Politics of Truth in Early America, and to develop an undergraduate course aimed at the fellowship’s theme of understanding and addressing political polarization in the United States. The stipend is among the most generous of its kind, and previous Carnegie fellows have received numerous honors for their research, such as the Nobel Prize and National Book Award.

“Concern about the declining importance of truth in American politics is a crisis that can feel new to us, but Katlyn’s scholarship is a reminder that this phenomenon has existed since the founding of our country,” said Kenneth Scheve, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters and a professor of political science. “I’m thrilled that the Carnegie Corporation is supporting her vital research on this topic, which will provide a much-needed historical lens to a question that is so fundamental to contemporary social and political life.”

A historian of 18th-century America and France, Carter explores research topics inspired by issues that feel intractable in our politics today, she said.

In her first book, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale University Press, 2023), Carter explored how decisions and debates about the place of secrecy in politics during early American and French revolutionary history shaped representative democracy and addressed the realities of what it meant to make government transparent in practice.

The book earned the Gilbert Chinard Book Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, was shortlisted for the Rodel Institute’s Edwards Book Award for its outstanding contribution to the understanding and practice of democracy and American politics, and received an honorable mention for the Louis Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for 18th Century Studies.

Through that project, Carter began developing questions about the origins of truth and trust as they related to the press and government — specifically in the United States.

“It’s one thing to say this group of people met in secret and talked about this, and that became a flash point. It’s another thing for people to say, ‘those people are lying to you, and I’m telling you the truth,’” Carter said. “And I just started getting really interested in tracing that in early American political debates and rhetoric.”

In The Politics of Truth in Early America, Carter will examine those large topics of truth, trust, communication technology, and politics in early American history by exploring digital archives and traveling to historic research centers and libraries in Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, London, Paris, and Washington, D.C.

She will also take the time to develop a course tentatively titled The Politics of Truth: A History, which will aim to “historicize some of the tough questions that we’re wrestling with today about truth and politics.”

“I want to try to take those challenges and try to break students out of this rigid political binary that we’re in right now by taking these difficult questions and translating them to history,” Carter said. “I just don’t think we can understand these challenges without understanding the history of those problems, of the political system we live in or of the way people have thought about these questions in the past.”

The Carnegie Fellowship class of 2026 is the third cohort focused on developing a body of rigorous, evidence-based research about what can be done to strengthen the forces of cohesion in the United States, an overarching priority for the foundation’s grant-making. The 2026 class also includes Notre Dame alumnus Wayde Marsh, who received a Ph.D. in political science in 2022 and is now an assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

With support from the Notre Dame Office of the Provost and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good, Carter became the fourth Notre Dame faculty member to receive a Carnegie Fellowship. David Campbell, the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy, and Atalia Omer, professor of religion, conflict, and peace studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs, both won in 2017, and political scientist Sarah Zukerman Daley won in 2018.

“There was a team of people at Notre Dame who are really skilled at what they’re doing and who really helped me deliver the message clearly and connect to the theme of the fellowship,” Carter said. “Important research and scholarship that connects with people and helps inform and work on current challenges takes time. This fellowship actually gives researchers time to read and think, which is increasingly rare in a society that really likes to push for efficiency and going fast. That’s really valuable.”

Originally published by Mary Kinney at news.nd.edu on May 05, 2026.

In partnership with three of the University’s Strategic Initiatives, the Franco Institute is funding seven new interdisciplinary collaboratives.

Arts Collaboratives (co-sponsored by the ND Arts Initiative):

Through a project titled “Archipelagos of Race,” Thomas Anderson, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Xavier Navarro Aquino, assistant professor of English, will investigate the artistic, linguistic, and cultural dimensions of race and ethnicity in the Caribbean through theoretical inquiry and artistic output.

Tatiana Reinoza, associate professor of art history, and history professor Karen Graubart seek to integrate humanities studies to ask broad questions, often related to policy, in their lab titled “Central American Racial Formations.” They believe that integrating humanities-based analysis with questions more commonly addressed through social sciences and policy will produce deeper and more people-centered scholarship and open new paths for understanding social injuries, connectivities, and conflicts.

Global Catholic Research Collaboratives (co-sponsored by the ND Global Catholic Research Initiative):

In “Medieval Roots to Global Networks: Catholic Sisters and the Archive,” Katie Bugyis, associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and director of postdoctoral studies, and CJ Jones, director of the Medieval Institute and professor in the Department of German, Slavic, and Eurasian Studies, draws on archival collections to examine how Catholic women religious communities understood, interpreted, and transmitted their histories as makers of historical knowledge who shaped their own institutional identities through scholarship, pedagogy, and archival practices.

Associate professor of philosophy Therese Cory and theology professor Paulinus Odozor have formed an international working group for their collaborative titled “Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition.” This collaborative works with 150 members engaged in the ongoing interpretation of the second Vatican Council and its significance for the global Church and in regional contexts.

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director for the Global Catholic Research Initiative, values the Strategic Initiatives’ partnership with the Franco Institute.

“The Global Catholic Research Initiative is proud to partner with the Franco Family Institute in supporting two of this year’s Research Innovation Collaboratives,” Cummings said. “By funding ‘From Medieval Roots to Global Networks: Catholic Sisters and the Archive’ and the International Working Group, ‘Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition,’ GCRI is investing in projects that exemplify the global scope, historical depth, and interdisciplinary strength of Notre Dame scholarship.”

In sum, Cummings stressed the importance of the Research Innovation Collaboratives’ role in scholarship at Notre Dame.

“Together, these collaborations advance the University’s mission to become the preeminent hub for research on global Catholicism,” she said.

Humanities Collaboratives:

William Donahue, professor in the Department of German, Slavic, and Eurasian Studies, will work with Jens Martin of the University of Amsterdam on a project titled “Contested History in Public Spaces: Toward a Global Memory Culture.” Their collaborative re-thinks terminology around public memory to accommodate the challenges around a “memory culture” that functions in dynamic and sometimes unpredictable patterns.

For their collaborative titled “Symphonic Wings Part II: Sustaining Our Common Home through Faith, Science, and Art,” Cynthia Katsarelis, assistant professor of the practice in Sacred Music and Ritornello Chamber Orchestra Director, and Paul Kollman, associate professor of theology, will turn their symphony project Symphonic Wings into a lasting and public-facing platform for thinking about insects through lenses of faith, culture, history, ethics, and care for the living world.

Sustainability Collaboratives (co-sponsored by the ND Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative):

History professor Julia Thomas will partner with Benjamin Goossen, an assistant professor of international history at Boston University, on “Asia and the Anthropocene: Bringing Human Histories and Earth History Together.” Their collaborative approaches the human activity of the Anthropocene from Asian perspectives to address what may be most useful about the Anthropocene as a distinctive framework for Asian histories and what drawbacks to such a framework may exist.

Originally published by Jacob Schepers at franco.nd.edu on May 05, 2026.

This year, nine undergraduate students from disciplines across the University earned honors for their strong research skills and effective use of library resources and services in their course assignments, research projects, and creative work.

“I am delighted to see the creative and diverse research demonstrated by this year’s winners,” said Margaret Meserve, the Edward H. Arnold Dean of the Hesburgh Libraries. “The quality of undergraduate research at Notre Dame is extraordinary. Here in the Libraries, we’re proud to provide services, collections, and spaces that support and inspire students as they grow as scholars.”

The award, sponsored annually by the Hesburgh Libraries, invites undergraduate students to submit a brief essay describing the many ways they used library resources for a project or assignment completed during summer 2025, fall 2025, or spring 2026.

Capstone or Thesis Research

First Place – $2,500
Gabriela Sierocka, senior
College of Arts & Letters, Computer Science

“I needed not just books but objects: the kind of primary materials that ask you to slow down, that resist the speed of digital research, that insist on being read with attention…The Hesburgh Libraries provided that, repeatedly and generously, in ways I could not have anticipated when I began.”

Second Place – $1,200
Kate Rafford, senior
College of Arts & Letters, American Studies and Economics

“My thesis would not have been possible without the sources I found in the University Archives collection, further supported by library workshops, databases, search tools, print and digital resources, and study spaces. I am very thankful to the library staff for guiding me through this journey and consistently supporting the resources that enable student success.”

General Research

First Place – $1,500
Maria Eduarda Grill da Silveira, sophomore
Keough School of Global Affairs, Global Affairs and Economics

“When I first typed that research question into a blank document, what I could not have anticipated was how completely Hesburgh would shape the answer… Every resource appeared at the precise moment the research demanded it, not as a supplement to the project, but as its foundation.”

Second Place – $750
Sadie Johnston, junior
Mendoza College of Business, Marketing and Spanish

“My project illustrates Hesburgh Library’s role as a catalyst in independent research — providing not only a physical space, but also an intellectual one for complex analysis, methodological mastery, and creative, multidisciplinary inquiries.”

First Year Research

First Place – $1,500
Ada Duru Ak, freshman
Keough School of Global Affairs, Global Affairs

“I do not think I could have pulled together the primary sources, the theoretical framework, and the supporting details as effectively without Hesburgh’s resources… I am grateful for the way the library supports student research, and this project made me appreciate how much is here, and how much I would have missed without it.”

Second Place – $750
Maggie Sheehan, freshman
College of Science, Biological Sciences and English

“When I submitted my final essay, my professor commented that it was well-researched. As I reflected on this comment, I realized that it was all due to the resources provided by the Hesburgh Library.”

Emerging Scholar - $500

Valeria Bautista Misakova, senior
College of Science, Physics and American Studies

“Archival work continues to shape history as we understand it today, and I’m grateful to have been part of the growing effort, all due in part to the resources at Hesburgh Libraries.”

Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship Award Winners - $500

Yingxin (Cindy) Liu, senior
College of Arts & Letters, Economics, Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, and Japanese

“Throughout my research journey, Hesburgh Library offered stable computing resources for data analysis, workshops on academic writing and locating economic literature, and access to librarians and curators who guided me in identifying reliable databases.”

Leina Ulutoa, junior
College of Arts & Letters, Political Science and Japanese

“Having participated in VR through the Immersive Technologies Lab, my research project and presentation became available in interactive, stimulating, and powerful ways.”

In the United States, ample attention was given to the novelty of how dads, in particular, were getting much more time to participate in the daily, often mundane, and yet intimate tasks of child-rearing. Many people hoped that the change would persist, allowing dads more time and flexibility in the long term — ultimately reshaping how we view fatherhood in general.

However, according to new research from anthropologist and fatherhood expert Lee Gettler of the University of Notre Dame, those fathering benefits have not outlasted the pandemic itself.

“COVID didn’t really lead to a large-scale uptick in this new vision for fathering on the part of dads across the board,” said Gettler, the Rev. John A. O’Brien College Professor of Anthropology and chair of the Department of Anthropology, as well as an affiliated faculty at the Eck Institute for Global Health and the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families.

“I think what’s been missing from many of those initial reports was a wider perspective on what the realities are for families and fathers in the United States and around the world following the pandemic,” he said, “especially as we think about common jobs for men, precarity in the workplace, and economic inequality.”

To address those gaps in understanding, Gettler and his team, which included co-author and postdoctoral research associate Sarah Hoegler Dennis, relied on 15 years of longitudinal data to compare fathers’ pre-COVID to post-COVID behaviors. The researchers looked at this data from a non-Euro-American perspective in a major metropolitan area in the Philippines.

What they found was that fathering behaviors, for the most part, did not change much before COVID began versus shortly after the pandemic ended.

“There was this idea out there that a meaningful percentage of dads were spending more time with their kids during the lockdown periods, even if they were still working, and that the dynamics of COVID would lead to this long-term effect on what and how much dads were doing within their families,” Gettler said. “And we just didn’t see that prevailing change.”

The research team drew on a large sample of men who were around 25 years old at the start of the study and followed them for the next 15 years as part of a larger set of research in Cebu, Philippines. Gettler and his team have been studying fathering and the “biology of fatherhood” as part of this project for close to 20 years, and have found that fathers in Cebu have become much more involved in the past few decades, mirroring father involvement in the United States.

During the pandemic, the Philippines also had one of the longest lockdown periods in the world, according to Gettler, with some of the most strict, government-mandated quarantine guidelines in place, making this an appropriate site to test for the effects of the stay-at-home orders on fathering.

“There are questions remaining about how we can continue to encourage dads in dual-parent families to pull their weight, be a supportive partner or to balance the responsibilities of what it takes to run a household and take care of young children. COVID exposed or habituated more dads to what that can look like, but now we need to enable them to continue that behavior.”

The researchers used waves of socio-demographic and fathers’ caregiving data collected prior to the pandemic (2009 and 2014) and after the pandemic (2022-23). The main analyses focused on caregiving changes over time for fathers who had young children at home both pre- and post-pandemic, looking at how involved they were with routine, hands-on care for babies and young children, recreational play and activities, and educational caregiving tasks.

“What we found is that COVID — and the time dads spent at home with their children during that period — did not change fathering in any lasting way,” Gettler said. “As soon as life gets back to normal, we see that dads are continuing to do the same thing they were doing before COVID.”

With one exception, Gettler noted.

For the group of fathers who found themselves going from employed to either unemployed or underemployed because of the pandemic, their involvement with their children’s educational care shot up noticeably, and the change persisted.

“We see this link with employment status and fathers’ ability to spend more time helping kids with school work and homework,” Gettler said. “But that’s the only hint that the conditions surrounding COVID may have contributed to some sort of change in what dads are doing at home.”

At the end of the day, dad’s employment status is the primary predictor for how much care he is providing, Gettler said. He believes that policy changes within the workplace — such as paid paternity leave and widespread flexibility on working from home or setting working hours — might lead to a more lasting change in fatherhood behavior. These structural changes could support permanent shifts in expectations and norms for men as caregivers, and open up more opportunities for dads to get — and stay — involved.

Gettler argued that society needs to recognize how it can better support dads and give them the chance to be more available at home, without the caveat of having to become unemployed or underemployed in order to enjoy such chances to be with their families.

“There are questions remaining about how we can continue to encourage dads in dual-parent families to pull their weight, be a supportive partner or to balance the responsibilities of what it takes to run a household and take care of young children,” Gettler said. “COVID exposed or habituated more dads to what that can look like, but now we need to enable them to continue that behavior.”

Gettler, who is also director of the Hormones, Health, and Human Behavior Lab, works with collaborators at multiple global sites and is an expert on fatherhood and healthy families, including the psychobiology of motherhood and fatherhood and parents’ physical and mental health, as well as child growth, development and physiology. Presently, Gettler works on research projects related to these interests in the United States, the Philippines and the Republic of the Congo.

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 April 30, 2026.

The Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) at the University of Notre Dame has named Holly Kuzmich as its next Michael L. Smith Managing Director following a national search. She will begin her role on July 7.

Kuzmich brings experience across venture philanthropy, national policy, and organizational leadership. Most recently, she served as a managing director at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, where she partnered with social entrepreneurs to help scale high-impact organizations.

Previously, Kuzmich was executive director of the George W. Bush Institute, where she led a 45-person team and guided the organization’s strategic direction. She also held senior roles in the federal government, including assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and associate director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.

“Holly brings an exceptional combination of leadership, policy expertise, and commitment to evidence that will help shape LEO’s next chapter,” said Jim Sullivan, co-founder of LEO and director of the University’s Poverty Initiative. “As we expand our partnerships and deepen our impact, her experience scaling organizations and navigating complex systems will be critical to ensuring that what we learn translates into meaningful change for the communities we serve.”

Her work has focused on using data and evidence to inform decision-making and improve outcomes at scale — an approach closely aligned with LEO’s mission to reduce poverty through evidence-based solutions.

“The evidence that LEO produces is vitally important to our nation's poverty-fighting organizations — and most importantly, to those living in poverty — as well as policymakers and philanthropy,” Kuzmich said. “LEO has quickly become a national leader, and I'm excited to build on its foundation and scale what works. I can't imagine a better institution than Notre Dame to take on this bold and important mission.”

Kuzmich will relocate to South Bend, her childhood hometown, as she steps into the role. She joins LEO as the organization continues to expand its partnerships and advance the use of evidence in policy and practice.

Originally published by Kathryn Desai and Tracy DeStazio at leo.nd.edu on April 28, 2026.

Tennes, an international economics and Spanish major from Charlotte, Michigan, will study Portuguese.

“This opportunity is particularly meaningful; three years ago, I traveled to Brazil for the first time through Project Global Officer, and I have been driven by the desire to return ever since,” Tennes said. “I am looking forward to continuing my study of Portuguese while further developing my cross-cultural understanding to support my future military career.”

London, a theology and physics double major from Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, will study Swahili.

“Through CLS, I’ll advance my language skills and build a bridge between East Africa and the United States in my own career,” London said. “I’m grateful to the mentors who have helped me grow toward this goal at Notre Dame, including Professors Dan Philpott and Nick Russo, Arnel Bulaoro of MSPS, Rachel Thiel and Holly Rivers of the Kellogg Institute, Father Paul Kollman, C.S.C., Professor Alessia Blad-Miller of the CSLC, and the incredible advisers at Flatley CUSE — Mathilda Nassar, Elise Rudt, and Emily Hunt.”

The Flatley Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement (CUSE) assists Notre Dame undergraduates with scholarly discernment and pursuits, including research and fellowships.

“I am so happy that Brianna and Joseph will get to have this unique experience and add to their academic trajectories,” said Mathilda Nassar, assistant director of national fellowships at CUSE. “They worked hard and are deeply committed to learning their target language. If anyone is interested in applying next year, I begin the application process in September.”

The Critical Language Scholarship Program is an intensive overseas language and cultural immersion program for American students enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities. Students spend eight to 10 weeks abroad studying one of nine critical languages. The program includes intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences designed to promote rapid language gains.

This year’s cohort of approximately 315 scholars was selected from a pool of more than 4,500 applicants. The winners hail from 49 U.S. states as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. More than 160 colleges and universities are represented.

For more on this and other scholarship opportunities, visit cuse.nd.edu.

Originally published by Erin Blasko at news.nd.edu on April 28, 2026.

James Kirk and Abigail Hemmen are digging into this political paradox, surveying Americans to answer the question, “In what contexts are American citizens most supportive of compromise?”

The two political science graduate students were able to start working on this project after receiving a Catalyst Grant from the University of Notre Dame’s Democracy Initiative in fall 2024. The multiyear investment allows them to finally explore issues they’ve been contemplating for years.

“We need to be thinking more strategically about what Americans actually mean and in what context they actually want to see their representatives compromise,” Kirk said.

Kirk and Hemmen are approaching the idea of compromise from several angles, getting a more realistic and nuanced view of how Americans feel about it. Instead of just asking, “Do you support compromise?” their surveys give respondents specific scenarios tied to controversial issues like abortion and transgender rights — topics where compromise becomes less hypothetical and more personal.

Their research is also capturing changes in Americans’ feelings about compromise in response to major events. When the federal government shut down in 2025, for example, Kirk and Hemmen couldn’t send out their planned survey questions for fear that current events would skew the results, so they crafted new questions about the shutdown, gathering insights into a very specific situation.

Kirk and Hemmen came up with the idea for this project in fall 2021, when they were tossing around research ideas at a Rooney Democracy Institute workshop, not long after events that challenged longstanding assumptions about American democracy.

“American politics has looked at the challenges in the development and persistence of democracy in other countries and said, ‘Oh, that could never happen here,’” Kirk said. “Political scientists have to think about how we can’t take for granted the norms of democracy that we teach to children in Schoolhouse Rock!”

Kirk and Hemmen hope that developing a better understanding of how Americans think about their government can help scholars, elected officials, and voters understand how democracy realistically works. That awareness can strengthen and protect American democracy for the present and future, Kirk said.

They’ll be sharing their results so far at the next meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, one of the largest gatherings of political scientists in the country.

Their project is one of many supported by the Democracy Initiative, a key component of Notre Dame 2033: A Strategic Framework and founded on the belief that democracy is a work in progress — with real resources needed to support that work.

Projects like Kirk and Hemmen’s require years of surveys that often depend on unreliable piecemeal funding from several small grants, but the Democracy Initiative makes it so Kirk and Hemmen don’t have to waste time worrying about how they’ll fund another month of research.

And that advantage isn’t just a nice perk; it’s imperative for a project dependent on collecting a large and diverse data set. Kirk and Hemmen will continue to examine more controversial and complex issues as public opinions and priorities fluctuate.

“We’re trying to get at people’s feelings, so it’s an ever-changing and very relevant project with a lot of different problems to think about,” Hemmen said.

“Political scientists, professors, and teachers are still working on better understanding American democracy with the goal of making it better and stronger — something that’s sustainable for future generations.” – James Kirk, ’25 Ph.D.

Kirk and Hemmen hope their project will continue years beyond their time as graduate students, tying them back to Notre Dame. Hemmen will receive her Ph.D. this spring, and she credits the project with her increased confidence in the kind of research she wants to base her career on.

“I’ve been able to mark the quantitative skills I’ve gained over my time here and the really good relationships I’ve developed with my grad school peers, my advisor, and faculty members,” she said.

Kirk is already seeing how the project impacts his future as a political scientist — he got his Ph.D. last year, and he’s now a visiting assistant professor of government at Smith College in Massachusetts. He’s found that showing his students the research he and others have done motivates them to engage with politics and fulfill their civic duties, even when their impact feels small.

“There’s so much negativity about politics and government in American democracy now — for valid reasons — but if I had just hopelessly given up on American democracy, I wouldn’t be doing this line of work,” he said. “Political scientists, professors, and teachers are still working on better understanding American democracy with the goal of making it better and stronger — something that’s sustainable for future generations.”

The Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Common Good hosted its inaugural Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton Culture and the Public Good Symposium on April 10. Named for two of the foremost socially engaged Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, the signature annual event culminated a year of themed research support at the institute.

This year's speakers were Vauhini Vara, journalist and author of The Immortal King Rao and Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age ; Shankar Vedantam, author and host of the Hidden Brain podcast; Jenny Odell, artist and author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time; and Rainn Wilson, award-winning actor, comedian, and New York Times bestselling author.

Notre Dame Magazine editor Jason Kelly recapped what these famous faces and voices had to say about our strained attention spans, how tech companies seek to monetize our time, and what we can do to cultivate deeper, more engaged life experiences.

Despite the shelving decisions of many bookstores, author Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is not a self-help book, a genre that promises readers nuggets of influencer insight to nourish their optimization quests. Instead, the book critiques the notion that even leisure should be curated in the service of economic efficiency.

“I have a whole section where I insist that the point of reading my book is not to make you feel refreshed enough to be more productive at work on Monday,” Odell said. “Rather, it’s to question our notions of productivity overall. What is considered productive labor and what is not, and why? It’s an important distinction to make, I write, when the phrase self-care is appropriated for commercial ends and risks becoming cliche.”

Odell was one of four featured speakers at the Downes Ballroom on campus April 10 for the inaugural Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton Culture and the Common Good Symposium. The event focused on attention (pun intended), the annual research theme for the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good.

Panelists were asked, “How should we hold attention?”

That has become an especially pressing question as we reckon with the costs of how we pay attention today. Nobody needs to be reminded that distractions are omnipresent. As we speak, white noise courses through my headphones to keep my mind on writing this rather than whatever my face-down phone has to entice me. (Nothing. I checked.)

Read more from Notre Dame Magazine

According to a recent study from the University of Notre Dame, voters who are comfortable living in the middle — neither agreeing nor disagreeing when asked about substantive issues relevant to upholding democracy — might be the largest group to blame for democratic decline in the United States.

These “democratic neutrals” are what the study’s co-authors consider some of the most dangerous voters in the current political environment.

Neutrality as leverage in democratic backsliding

Using three surveys of more than 45,000 voting-age Americans, the researchers found that about half of the U.S. population expresses an attitude of democratic neutrality — or an “unwillingness to support or oppose policies or practices that undermine democracy,” explained Matthew E.K. Hall, lead author of the study recently published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

“Neutrality towards democracy, rather than outright opposition, has enabled democratic backsliding among various Western democracies as elected officials leverage citizens’ neutral attitudes to pursue antidemocratic outcomes,” Hall and his two co-authors wrote in their study.

The danger in this “neither support nor oppose” mentality lies in its lukewarm approach to what matters and to which lines should or should not be crossed when it comes to protecting our democracy. And that, Hall said, is problematic because if the public isn’t willing to hold its leaders accountable, then there’s nothing to stop them from behaving in ways that undermine democracy.

Neutrality on both sides of the aisle

Hall, who is the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Professor of Constitutional Studies in Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science and the director of the Rooney Democracy Institute, conducted the research with B. Tyler Leigh, research fellow at the Rooney Democracy Institute, and Brittany C. Solomon, the Thomas A. and James J. Bruder Assistant Professor of Administrative Leadership in the Mendoza College of Business.

Relying on data from two surveys they conducted in the summers of 2024 and 2025, and a third, larger survey sent weekly through the YouGov panel between 2022 and 2023, the researchers asked participants about their attitudes toward undemocratic practices. The questions included whether they agreed, disagreed or felt neutral when asked about their support for four examples of undemocratic practices: reducing outparty polling stations, ignoring outparty court decisions, remaining loyal to the party over the Constitution, and censoring partisan media.

Roughly 50 percent of participants checked the neutral category for at least one question. In contrast, outright agreement with undemocratic practices was much less common. But, between the two segments, up to two-thirds of respondents did not actively oppose undemocratic practices on the part of government officials, political candidates and leaders.

“Not actively opposing undemocratic practices is different than actively supporting democracy,” Hall said.

Neutrality, the researchers noted, is especially concerning because it can be associated with authoritarianism, tolerance of norm violations, extremism, distrust, and obscuring antidemocratic views.

Another, equally critical point, Hall said, is that this neutrality exists at similar rates on both sides of the aisle, among Republicans and Democrats, as well as nonpartisans.

Why voters remain neutral

The researchers identified several reasons that voters choose the “neither agree nor disagree” category. Hall explained that some Americans tolerate politicians undermining democracy on a conditional basis if it means those entities enact policies they favor, but then they don’t like those same undemocratic decisions when made by leaders in the other party. They vote according to the mantra, “It depends.”

Some voters are just uncertain about which direction to lean, or believe they don’t have the knowledge or understanding to vote appropriately. Other voters are simply indifferent or apathetic — they simply do not care about politics. Another group of neutrals are ambivalent toward the survey questions because they care strongly in two conflicting directions and feel indecisive. A fifth group actually supports anti-democratic policies but feels social pressure to say they don’t, so they feign neutrality.

“Regardless of why Americans express neutrality, those who do so are just as likely to vote for authoritarian politicians as the relatively small number of Americans (less than one in five) who explicitly support undemocratic practices,” Hall said.

Potential solutions ahead of the 2026 midterms

Hall and his co-authors said that neutrality is not only a big problem, but it’s also a problem that will take a novel approach to fix.

“The problem is the people sitting on the sidelines, not paying attention or prioritizing short-term issues over the long-term stability of this country,” Hall said. “This will require a completely different approach with regard to persuasion strategy when you realize that’s the group we — as proponents of American democracy — need to be focusing on. Promoting democracy is going to look a little different than we thought.”

What does that promotion look like then? Hall and his co-authors see the primaries for the approaching 2026 midterm elections as the next opportunity to encourage Americans to vote for candidates who will support and protect American democracy. Messaging will need to encourage voters to “vote against candidates who undermine American democracy — even (and especially) if they are candidates from their own party,” emphasizing that staying neutral will no longer suffice.

“American politics have really been shaken in this last decade, particularly with regard to partisanship and polarization,” Hall said.

“The elites have lost control of the throttle, and the mass public is driving — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing if the mass public values democracy. But if they don’t value democracy, then we will spin out.”

This research aligns with the University’s Democracy Initiative, which aims to establish Notre Dame as a leader in the study of democracy both in the United States and worldwide, as a convenor for conversations about and actions to preserve democracy, and as a model for the formation of civically engaged citizens and public servants. The initiative also bridges research, education, and policy work across multidisciplinary units.

The research was supported by the Rooney Democracy Institute, which is dedicated to promoting scholarship, knowledge, and dialogue on American democracy.

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 April 21, 2026.

Jon Bullock’s research has brought him around the world, and he’s brought the world into his O’Neill Hall office.

Bullock is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the music of the Kurds, an ethnic group that lives at the juncture of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. His interest in Kurdish music began when he came across an article about Iraqi Kurds in a 1975 issue of National Geographic — which currently lives on his office bookshelf.

“I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder what Kurdish music is like. There must be lots of material out there,’” Bullock said. “But I realized not much work at all was done in the realm of Kurdish music, and so I thought, ‘Here’s my opening.’”

One doctorate and many visits to Kurdistan later, Bullock’s office is full of photos, instruments, and other mementos from within and beyond the region.

This feature is part of a College of Arts & Letters story series called “Office Hours,” which provides a glimpse into the personal and professional lives of Arts & Letters faculty through their workspaces around campus. This installment highlights Bullock, an assistant professor in the Department of Music, whose research currently focuses on the role of music in Kurdish radio broadcasting.

In this interview, Bullock discusses important pieces in his office that inspire him and are relevant to his research, his teaching, and his personal life.

Bullock’s answers have been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Q: What is ethnomusicology, and what instruments do you keep in here?

A: Ethnomusicology is the study of music in culture. It’s essentially looking at music in its cultural context — not just as an object to be

analyzed, but also an activity that’s informed by and sustains culture itself. You can think of it as the anthropology of music.

I’ve been collecting instruments for quite a while. This is actually the most recent instrument I’ve acquired. It’s called a santur. It’s really common in the Persian realm, so anywhere from Kurdistan, stretching east all the way across much of Central and South Asia. It probably traces its roots back to Babylon, so it’s been around a very long time.

Here we have an axatse, which is an African percussion instrument. It’s really great for percussion discussions in the Intro to Ethnomusicology course because it’s really loud. And here is an mbira, which is also called thumb piano. It’s an instrument from Zimbabwe — the Shona people.

We’ve got a drum — a djembe — and some chimes here. And this is one of my favorites. This is a goblet drum that I picked up in 2010. I taught English in Kazakhstan that summer, and the family I stayed with took me with them on a trip to Tajikistan, just across the border. That’s where I picked up this drum. It’s got a skin head, and the body is made out of clay. I play it from time to time, so it’s still in good working order.

We’ve got a slit gong here — some of these pieces I didn’t pick up in their locales of origin; I’ve just sort of found them in random places. That’s the case for this one, which is from Cameroon in Central Africa. It’s nice to have examples of the different kinds of instruments, especially for students. I really like taking them into class when I can.

Q: Is there an instrument here you like to play?

A: I play Irish whistle, and I actually played with Notre Dame’s Céilí Band 2024-25. I still play in my office quite often.

That was a piece called “The Swallowtail.” It’s a jig. I started learning whistle when I was in my first master’s program in ethnomusicology. We had to learn a new instrument, preferably one that was not a standard Western classical instrument. I had a good friend in Staunton, Virginia, who taught flute and also Irish flute and whistle, so I took lessons with her. Coming to Notre Dame was obviously a perfect opportunity to use the instrument, and I was thrilled to travel to Ireland with the Céilí Band in 2024.

Q: Aside from the instruments, what in here do you show your classes?

A: This photo here is an important one I like to share. I bought this in Iraq in 2019, and the photographer’s name is Hawre Khalid. He’s an Iraqi Kurdish photographer who traveled around the country between 2014 and 2019, documenting the aftermath of the Iraq War.

The photo is of a family from Mosul, which is the city that ISIS had completely taken over in 2014. Mosul was bombed by U.S. forces and Iraqi forces around 2018 to try and liberate the city. This family was trying to escape the bombing, and there are a lot of things that are striking about the photo. For one thing, even though the bombing represented a liberation of the city, the reality for a lot of people was displacement and continuing hardship — which is not to say that the city shouldn’t have been liberated, but it’s a reminder of the true cost of war. I’m also struck by the juxtaposition of the fact that above their heads is an ad for a common dessert — something extra, a nice little treat — and a family who’s been completely displaced, and everything they have is right there with them.

Q: What are some of the souvenirs you keep in here?

A: These on the top here are all from my time in Kazakhstan in 2010. The traditional, famous Kazakh house is the yurt, and this is my little felted mini yurt. Next to it is a pen that says “Kazakhstan.”

This rug on the wall came from Kazakhstan as well. It’s a prayer rug featuring the Kaaba in Mecca. On the left, this goat skin with a handwritten chapter of the Quran is from Iraq.

For centuries, many of the Kurdish tribes were nomadic, and goats were a really important part of their life, producing milk and agricultural products but also goat hair tents. So goats themselves are really prominent historically in Kurdish culture.

I also have three rugs on the floor that come from Kurdistan. They’re really special in part because, like so many traditional arts in so many places, traditional rug making is kind of an endangered art, so I always try and do what I can when I’m there to help keep the artistry alive.

Q: Where do you look in here for inspiration?

A: At all of the photos, especially the ones from Kurdistan — it’s inspiring being reminded of everything the Kurds as a whole have been through, from colonial intervention in the early 20th century to the genocide committed under Saddam Hussein to now. Iraq is the part of Kurdistan where my field work is based, so all these pictures on canvas are photos I’ve taken there.

This one here on the left — it just looks like a living room, which it is, but it’s the living room of a dear friend of mine. She and her husband recently built this house, and on the property, they’ve also built a cultural center for hosting visiting artists and scholars. I was actually the first to get to stay there in January 2024, and one of the things I love about it is there was a real commitment when they were building to using traditional Kurdish art and architecture, and so all of the stone work that you see is done by Kurdish masons from different parts of Kurdistan.

Kurds are often called the world’s largest stateless nation. But in the absence of the official state structures of celebrating and keeping alive Kurdish culture and tradition, it’s amazing that there are individuals like this who are doing it for themselves.

I sent the owners of this house a message recently — I think it was last August, because there had been a major firefight in the city, and several people had died. So I reached out and said, “Hey, I just want to make sure you guys are OK.” And she responded by sending me back a voice clip. I think it was only 10 seconds long, but it was her and some friends in that living room, sitting there clapping and singing, and she said, “As you can hear, we are having an evening of singing. That’s what you do when there is continuous conflict all the time.”

That kind of resilience and that ability to just keep moving forward — to just keep building, to just keep singing — has been so inspirational and so meaningful to me.

But they can’t do it on their own. They need editors, publishers, translators, donors, and supportive spouses — people Michel Hockx calls “travel agents.”

As an expert in Chinese literature who’s published four monographs, seven edited volumes, a book-length translation, and dozens of journal articles, Hockx is a literary travel agent himself. Now, he’s researching how other agents have guided the trajectories of Chinese writers as their work moves throughout their country and beyond.

In support of this work, Hockx has been awarded a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), one of the world’s foremost centers for intellectual inquiry into the sciences and the humanities. He will spend the 2026-27 academic year at the IAS campus in Princeton, New Jersey, working on his next book, tentatively titled “Modern Chinese Writers and Their Travel Agents.”

“I’m delighted to be able to spend a year at IAS and interact with others who work in literature and culture, as well as those who come from different fields and different places,” said Hockx, a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Notre Dame. “To be part of the community and work on my research — it’s going to be great.”

The IAS fellowship will mark the end of Hockx’s 10 years leading the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, during which he significantly increased the number of Asia-focused faculty fellows, secured two major Korea Foundation grants, helped to integrate the institute into the Keough School of Global Affairs, and strengthened University relationships with partners in Asia.

As he begins his next chapter writing his next book, Hockx isn’t starting from scratch — he’s drawing from research and relationships he’s cultivated throughout his career.

The foundation of the project is Chinese poet Wu Xinghua, whom Hockx first wrote about in 1999. Wu began writing during World War II while living in Japanese-occupied Beijing, and when Communist forces entered the city in 1949, he stayed to pursue a career outside poetry. However, his friend Song Qi relocated to Hong Kong and later Taiwan, and brought Wu’s poems, publishing them under a different name.

“Wu’s poems influenced this whole generation of Taiwanese and Hong Kong poets, but nobody knew who he was except for a few people,” Hockx said.

Wu died in China’s Cultural Revolution, before scholars looked into his pseudonymous work decades later. It was then that his story came to light, and his works were finally published. Hockx received some manuscripts from Wu’s family during that time, becoming part of the trajectory of Wu’s writing and legacy.

In the book’s first chapter, Hockx will delve deeper into Wu’s story and the literary travel agents who ensured his writing survived. Hockx also hopes to uncover more stories from the Cold War era, when others often risked their lives to carry texts outside of China.

The rest of the book will draw from Hockx’s more than 30-year career, during which he connected with writers such as novelist Hong Ying.

He’ll also devote a chapter to translation’s role in the travel of Chinese literature, specifically focusing on the decisions translators make when they have to change a text, which are sometimes motivated by censorship or to smooth the subtle ridges of cultural differences. Hockx explored the effect of censorship in his book Literature and Censorship in Modern China, which was published in March. Working on that particular piece helped him realize how much he wanted to gather and unfold different aspects of his career.

“Writing that book opened the floodgates,” he said. “I realized that there’s so much that I know from reading over the years and talking to people and writing articles.”

While Hockx doesn’t have to hunt down too many new research leads, it’s certainly not an easy task to pull together decades of work. But it’s necessary to capture a nuanced image of the world of Chinese literature.

“People think everything in China is very unidirectional, very monotonous, very restrictive for writers,” Hockx said. “But that’s just never been my experience.”

While censorship and political pressure exist in China, Hockx said he doesn’t want them to limit how other scholars view the creativity displayed both in print and online. Learning about Chinese literature, he said, can reveal insights about mobility and globalization more broadly.

“I don’t make decisions about what is good about literature,” Hockx said. “I just look at what’s out there.”

In this podcast episode of Notre Dame Stories, Melissa Kearney, the Gilbert F. Schaefer Professor of Economics and director of the Strengthening Families Research Initiative, explores the decline in marriage, the rise of single-parent households, and the falling fertility rates in the United States. Drawing on decades of research, she connects these trends to economic inequality, child well-being, and public policy—making the case that strengthening families is essential to improving outcomes across society.

Listen and subscribe to Notre Dame Stories, the official podcast of the University of Notre Dame, wherever you get your podcasts.

The University of Notre Dame’s Joyelle McSweeney, the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English, has won the Windham-Campbell Prize for her work in poetry.

McSweeney, who chairs the Department of English in the College of Arts & Letters, was one of eight writers to win the prestigious annual global literary award, administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which recognizes exemplary work across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.

Winners receive $175,000 to support their work and focus on their creative practice free from financial concerns. With annual prize money exceeding $1.4 million — and total prize money awarded over the past decade at over $20 million — it is one of the most significant prizes in the world.

McSweeney was recognized by the prize’s anonymous selection committee for her “complex, powerful, and contemplative ecopoetic writing, exploring nature, trauma, style, and resilience through the ‘necropastoral’, whilst subverting our understanding of contemporary language.”

“Joyelle McSweeney’s wildly imaginative, rageful poems turn decay into sustenance and go on defying death by thriving on rot,” they wrote.

McSweeney has written nine books, her most recent being the 2024 poetry collection Death Styles. Her 2022 double poetry collection, Toxicon and Arachne, was named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and won the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. McSweeney wrote the first part during the years leading up to the birth of her third daughter, Arachne, and wrote the second part in the spring following Arachne’s brief life and death.

She attributes her work to an “obsession” over the idea that what we think is over is indeed not over and that she writes her poetry to come alive in the moment of performance.

“Poetry, for me, is a quest to find out why we have to live this way, what the gods might have in store for us, how we can get back what we lost, and what we can give to each other,” she said.

In addition to the Windham-Campbell Prize, McSweeney was a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, won a Modern Language Association translation prize, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and is a 2025 Jeopardy champion. She also led Notre Dame’s Creative Writing Program for four years.

“This prize recognizes the body of work I’ve created during my 20 years here at Notre Dame, in which I’ve been inspired and supported by so many colleagues in every discipline,” she said. “In this sense, this prize also recognizes Notre Dame’s unwavering support for research and creativity across science, humanities, and the arts. We need every route to Truth, and we need to do it together.”

With a significant new investment, the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts & Letters is launching the Human Neuroimaging Center to drive innovation in interdisciplinary neuroscience and uncover how brain networks shape the remarkable capacities of the human mind.

The center’s work explores enduring questions in the psychological and brain sciences, including how the biological foundations of the mind enable learning, resilience, and flourishing — capacities central to the fullness of human life.

Led by Aron Barbey, the Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor of Psychology, who joined the Notre Dame faculty last fall, the center advances an integrated vision of modern neuroscience grounded in scientific rigor, humanistic insight, and ethical responsibility.

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

Barbey and his research team will utilize advanced neuroimaging techniques — including high-resolution functional and structural MRI, diffusion tensor imaging, and computational modeling — to investigate the foundations of human intelligence.

He joined Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology after faculty appointments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. At Illinois, he held multiple leadership roles at the Beckman Institute, including director of the Center for Brain Plasticity. He later served as the Mildred Francis Thompson Professor and director of the Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior at Nebraska.

His previous research — supported by more than $30 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and several other organizations — has explored how intelligence emerges from the network organization and dynamics of the human connectome, applying methods from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, and computer science.

“At Notre Dame, I believe we have a remarkable opportunity to lead in neuroscience because of the breadth of expertise on our campus — not only in psychology, and increasingly in neuroscience, but also in the humanities and social sciences.” – Aron Barbey, Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor of Psychology

Ultimately, his work aims to deepen understanding of the neural foundations of intelligence and to advance innovations in cognitive enhancement, neurorehabilitation, and biologically inspired artificial intelligence. Barbey’s research investigates how the brain’s finite architecture gives rise to the flexibility of human intelligence — our capacity to learn, adapt, and solve the diverse problems we face in life.

The Human Neuroimaging Center, co-located with the Veldman Family Psychology Clinic at 501 N. Hill Street in South Bend, will support a growing group of Notre Dame human neuroscience faculty, including three junior faculty who will arrive this fall, with more new hires planned for the coming years.

Barbey, his team, and other neuroscientists will use a state-of-the-art Siemens Magnetom Cima.X 3 Tesla whole-body MRI system to produce structural, functional, and metabolic brain imaging, enabling characterization of the human connectome with remarkable precision.

“Neuroscience offers a profound new lens through which we can view the human experience — one that enriches our existing strengths in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, offering new ways of developing deep insights about how we think, feel, and interact,” said Kenneth Scheve, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters. “At the same time, this center will help us build meaningful scientific collaborations across campus in a way that establishes Notre Dame as a leader in the holistic study of the human mind.”

The center is organized around seven research themes that investigate how brain networks support the capacities that shape human life — and how this knowledge can be used with care and responsibility:

• Neuroscience of human intelligence — How do differences in the organization and dynamics of the human connectome shape memory, attention, reasoning, and problem solving?

• Neuroscience of lifespan development — How does connectivity evolve from childhood through adulthood, and how do experiences — including education and embodied practices such as handwriting — influence developmental trajectories?

• Neuroscience of belief systems — How do executive, social, and affective brain networks support belief systems and moral decision making, including participation in social, ethical, and religious practices?

• Neuroscience of mental health — How do changes in brain network function contribute to mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions, and how can insights into these changes advance diagnosis and new approaches to treatment?

• Neuroscience of traumatic brain injury (TBI) — How does TBI disrupt and reorganize the network architecture of the human connectome, and how can neuroimaging guide better diagnosis and treatment protocols in student-athlete and military populations?

• Neuroscience of human performance in military service — How do multiple dimensions of performance — across cognitive, physical, and neurobiological measures — change over the course of military service, and how can long-term measurement help strengthen readiness while supporting the health and resilience of service members?

• Neuroscience of brain health promotion — How can modern scientific interventions — including cognitive training, non-invasive brain stimulation, mindfulness meditation, physical activity, and nutrition — shape brain connectivity to promote brain health and resilience across the lifespan?

  

“The mission of our neuroimaging center is to advance neuroscience through rigorous research that is attentive to the broader human questions that inspire it,” Barbey said, “seeking not only to understand the complex and dynamic networks of the human brain, but also to ensure this knowledge benefits the individuals and the communities that we serve.”

Through these themes, Barbey sees ways for neuroscience to engage directly with broader questions of human development, belief, health, performance, and responsibility — ensuring that scientific advances are interpreted in light of history, culture, and enduring questions of human meaning.

“At Notre Dame, I believe we have a remarkable opportunity to lead in neuroscience because of the breadth of expertise on our campus — not only in psychology, and increasingly in neuroscience, but also in the humanities and social sciences,” he said. “The brain is more than a biological system; it underlies how we think, learn, and relate to one another. Its activity is shaped by biology and experience — including culture, history, family, and community. For that reason, neuroscience matters not only for what it reveals about the brain, but for how its insights enrich learning, promote health, and enable flourishing — in service of human dignity and the good we share.”

Ken Kollman has always been fascinated by politics. But he never wanted to work in it — he just wanted to study it.

Initially, he believed that meant a career path in journalism, so he majored in English and government while he was an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame. But while working on his senior thesis, he became enthralled with the possibilities of diving into research.

“I realized how much I liked getting really deep into something and devoting a lot of time and attention to something to try to get it right,” he said. “Research has a way of being incremental — you find questions you're interested in, and you pursue them.”

Throughout his career, Kollman has followed the winding road of his interests through both American and comparative politics. Along the way, he became a leading scholar in both subfields, fundamentally reshaping how scholars think about party systems and interest group politics.

After 32 years at the University of Michigan — where he served in leadership roles including associate department chair, director of graduate admissions, acting vice provost for international affairs, and director of the Center for Political Studies — Kollman joined Notre Dame this semester as the Dr. William M. Scholl Professor of Politics in the Department of Political Science and the Keough School for Global Affairs.

“One of my colleagues at Michigan said that Notre Dame just seems like it’s on fire — in a good way,” Kollman said. “And it’s fun to join something like that.”

The author of ‘classics’

A recurring theme throughout Kollman’s research has been the relationship between citizens and their governments — specifically, what they want their governments to do and what their governments actually do.

Early in his career, he examined American political organizations’ work in elections and lobbying and how that ultimately pressures the government. This led to his first book Outside Lobbying: Public Opinion and Interest Group Strategies (Princeton University Press, 1998), and several journal articles that tackle how public opinion shapes political parties, which then shape governments. Eleven years after its publication, the book was recognized by a Southern Political Science Association panel as one of the “classics” in the field of interest group politics.

Later, Kollman turned his attention to federalism, examining which levels of government are more or less responsive to people and how different levels of government do or don’t work together. This time, he looked beyond the U.S., incorporating perspectives from the European Union, Canada, and India, as well.

“If you don't study other countries, you don't see the great variety and the way that countries structure their governments and their elections and their constitutional processes,” he said.

Kollman wrote several books and articles on the subject, with The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States (Princeton University Press, 2004) being his most prominent. In it, Kollman challenges longstanding theories of party system size and nationalization.

One external reviewer described the work as “a classic, widely read and cited text that is a milestone in the study of party systems.” It won the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties Section in 2005, and also won the 2024 Martha Derthick Best Book Award from the APSA’s Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations section, which is given to the best book published 10 or more years ago that made a lasting contribution to the study of federalism and intergovernmental relations.

“This book exhibits why Kollman is the rare scholar who has excelled in both the American and comparative politics subfields of political science,” said Geoffrey Layman, a Notre Dame professor of political science and chair of the department. “Here, Kollman displays a deep understanding of American politics — but by examining the U.S. in the context of a comparative analysis of the American, Canadian, British, and Indian party systems, he not only provides keen insights into party politics in countries outside the U.S., but uncovers insights into American politics that would not have been possible by focusing solely on the U.S.”

Hard work for the public good

Now, Kollman has focused his work on the fundamentals of global election operations and political parties. In his research, he links socially driven issues such as climate change, vaccinations, and crime rates to election data. He recently co-authored Dynamic Partisanship: How and Why Voter Loyalties Change (University of Chicago Press, 2021), which includes a detailed analysis of data from the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the U.K on how and why voters’ allegiances to political parties shift.

To help him compile and understand these vast topics, Kollman relies on massive data sets, including the Constituency-Level Election Archive, the world’s largest repository of election results data, which he cofounded.

“From tiny Caribbean countries all the way up to India, we have all the data on pretty much almost every country that's ever had an election,” he said.

Kollman has received numerous awards for his groundbreaking work, including the 2024 Samuel Eldersveld Career Achievement Award from the APSA’s Political Organizations and Parties Section.

And he’s far from being done.

Outside of the four books he’s published, Kollman has also written 24 refereed journal articles, 11 edited volume chapters, and six editions of a single-authored textbook on American politics. He is also the editor of multiple editions of a reader for American government classes and co-editor of a book on computational models in political economy research and a book on area studies in American social science.

Kollman has also been involved in securing significant external grant funding, receiving more than $47 million in external grants as a principal investigator or co-principal investigator. And he’s been a key contributor to the compiling and archiving of several major publicly available datasets, including the Constituency-Level Election Archive, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, the Subnational Geospatial Data Archive, and the National Neighborhood Data Archive.

“Developing publicly available datasets is generally underappreciated in terms of scholarly visibility,” Layman said. “But it is very hard work, and it provides very important public goods to the scholarly community.”

The opportunity to explore and expand that cultivation of data assets, plus the University’s commitment to tackling pressing political issues through the Democracy Initiative, ultimately drew Kollman to Notre Dame.

“I'm interested in being part of a process of institutional development and building new infrastructure that will help students, faculty, and other constituents of Notre Dame do their work better,” he said. “Notre Dame’s approach to higher education, the approach to the role of the university in society, has always resonated with me. And what Notre Dame offers to students, faculty, alums, the community, and the people who benefit from their research is very, very attractive to me.”

Rebecca Maloy, the J.W. van Gorkom Professor of Music and director of Sacred Music at Notre Dame, and Alexander Jech, a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy, were among the 84 scholars nationwide to receive the competitive awards in 2026.

During her NEH fellowship, Maloy will work on a monograph exploring the Old Hispanic rite, tentatively titled “Sounding the Saints in Early Medieval Iberia.” Jech will write a monograph that wrestles with the totality of Søren Kierkegaard’s seminal 1843 work, Fear and Trembling.

Maloy has studied medieval liturgy and chant, specifically Hispanic liturgy, for more than 15 years. She examines how liturgy and music influenced ideas about saints and sainthood on the Iberian Peninsula, a region with traditions of liturgical commemoration distinct from other parts of the medieval world.

Drawing from liturgical manuscripts, she will show how the text and melodies of Old Hispanic liturgy shaped the identities, beliefs, and agency of medieval communities.

For Maloy, studying worship practices from the past provides a fresh perspective on how worship can be done in the modern world. Medieval Christians understood the importance of music in worship, especially how belief could be shaped and amplified by the beauty of a melody.

“While earlier scholars have doubted whether chant melodies relate to the semantic content of their texts, the answer here is a resounding ‘yes!’” Maloy said. “The liturgies were designed to imprint key saintly values by making a maximum impact on the memory and senses.”

Maloy’s research has implications beyond her subfield, as studying devotion to the saints gives medievalists key insights into what mattered in medieval societies and how those priorities influenced historical events.

Maloy approaches her work having personally experienced the power of music on belief as director of Sacred Music at Notre Dame. The graduate program equips organ, choral conducting, and voice students with professional performance experience and theological training so they can become future music leaders in churches, concert halls, and schools and universities.

“One of the principles behind SMND is the idea that music can serve as a channel and a means of evangelization,” she said. “It’s very exciting to me to study how that was done in the Middle Ages,” she said.

Jech, meanwhile, will write a monograph tentatively titled “The Paradox of Faith: A Literary-Philosophical Commentary on Fear and Trembling,” which seeks to fill a gap in existing scholarly analysis of Kierkegaard’s most important and difficult work.

Existing commentaries and analyses of Fear and Trembling either operate at an introductory level or focus on only a subset of its themes, arguments, and ideas, Jech said, and these works almost always approach the philosophical, not the literary, side. After noticing this gap while preparing to teach a course on existentialism many years ago, Jech devoted significant time to considering how its parts worked together and how he could approach writing a detailed commentary that considers it as a whole.

“I realized there was a need to consider how it blends together literary and philosophical methods in pursuit of a religious topic,” Jech said. “The philosophical side has been so central that it’s been difficult to explain how it achieves its intellectual lightning strike — you need to consider both perspectives to do that.”

With the fellowship, Jech will spend time in Copenhagen, exploring archives of Kierkegaard’s manuscripts and notes to gain insight into his thought process while writing Fear and Trembling. Those notes also reference periodicals and other documents from Kierkegaard’s era that Jech intends to track down while in Denmark as well as talking with scholars of the Danish Golden Age about Danish poetry and the impact of Romanticism on 19th-century Danish culture.

An extended treatise on the nature of faith as demonstrated in Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, Fear and Trembling challenges “Sunday School definitions” of the concept and wrestles with what it means to truly believe in God. Jech hopes his book will be a means by which scholars of philosophy and literature, as well as educated lay people, can more thoroughly engage with the way Kierkegaard explores that concept.

“The paradox of faith, for Kierkegaard, has to do with fulfilling the passion of faith and not just understanding how pursuing it leads to being fulfilled,” he said. “Being faithful can mean that what you are doing seems to be undermining everything — Abraham raises the knife above the child of promise — but that’s the heart of the paradox. You try to do something, but you also seem to undermine it by how you pursue it, by depending on God for it. Abraham is the most intense version of this, but for Kierkegaard, that paradox applies to anyone who tries to live religiously, from Abraham to the person who simply tries to follow the Sermon on the Mount.”

Leading scholars of the Irish language from across Europe and North America gathered in central London last week for In ÉiNDí 2026, an academic seminar conducted entirely in the Irish language and hosted at Notre Dame London.

According to the seminar’s organizer, Brian Ó Conchubhair, professor of Irish language and literature at the University of Notre Dame, the gathering is an important moment for Irish-language scholarship in Britain.

“To our knowledge, this may be the first academic conference hosted in the UK that is conducted entirely through Irish,” Ó Conchubhair said. “It reflects the growing international community of scholars who use Irish as a language of research and intellectual exchange.”

Hosting the seminar in London reflects the global reach of Irish-language scholarship. As an international center for the study of Ireland and its language, the University of Notre Dame has long played a leading role in advancing Irish studies beyond Ireland. In ÉiNDí 2026 represents an example of this commitment, bringing scholars together in a global setting to strengthen Irish as a language of research and intellectual exchange. The seminar's organizer, Brian Ó Conchubhair, is a fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs and a leader of the Irish Language Initiative in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters.

The two-day seminar featured keynote lectures from leading Irish-language scholars, including Máire Ní Mhaonaigh of University of Cambridge, Pádraig Ó Siadhail of University of St Mary’s University Halifax, and James Little of the University of Cyprus. Presenters also included scholars from universities across Ireland and beyond, with representatives from every major Irish university participating in the program.

Beyond textual scholarship, the seminar also explored how Irish-language sources can be used for deeper understanding of broader social and historical questions. Presentations examined topics ranging from the emotional lives reflected in medieval texts to Irish-language responses to global political issues, including reactions to apartheid in South Africa. These topics show that the Irish language has always been a medium for responding to global human rights issues and internal psychological states.

The seminar also addressed contemporary concerns facing Irish-speaking communities. For example, sessions explored topics such as language use in health care settings and the ways in which Irish speakers navigate both Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) communities and the wider English-speaking world.

Discussions highlighted how the field is evolving to reach new generations of scholars and students. Digital tools and resources, such as the Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL), are making centuries of Irish-language material more accessible, helping to connect traditional Irish Studies with the research habits and expectations of a digital-native Generation Z.

“The timing of the event in 2026 is a significant milestone,” Ó Conchubhair said. “With sessions tracing the history of Irish programs from 1972 to 2026, the seminar offers a moment to reflect on more than fifty years of institutional progress. It is both a celebration of survival and an opportunity to think strategically about the future of the language in a globalized world, ensuring that Irish remains a vibrant, intellectual, and research-driven language on the world stage.”

Learn more about Irish Language Initiatives at Notre Dame. 

Originally published by Joanna Byrne at london.nd.edu on March 17, 2026.

Stepping into Kate Marshall’s office is a bit like stepping into a one-room museum, with antique typewriters, artifacts of early cinema, and book-making tools among the pieces on her shelves.

“The objects I keep around me represent what I’m really excited about in humanist work,” she said. “There’s often an element of materiality — I’m interested in how texts are made and what media go into making them.”

This feature is part of a College of Arts & Letters story series called “Office Hours,” which provides a glimpse into the personal and professional lives of Arts & Letters faculty through their workspaces around campus. This installment highlights Marshall, the Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs College Professor in the Department of English, whose research and teaching focus on the interactions of media, technology, and genre in contemporary literature.

In this interview, Marshall discusses important pieces in her office that inspire her and are relevant to her writing, her roles as associate dean for research and strategic initiatives and director of the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good, and her personal life.

Marshall’s answers have been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Q: What do you want people to feel when they enter your office?

A: I want them to feel welcome and excited about research in the college.

The objects I keep around me represent what I’m really excited about in humanist work. I also have books related to the Franco Institute’s research theme, which this year is attention. For example, I have a book by one of the speakers of our symposium, How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, over here. I also have some books in the office that are related to the future of the humanities, something that we talk and think about in the Institute.

I think that it is important to pair your intellectual projects with the administrative work you do. I’m writing a book about the novella and reading short fiction in the age of attention, so I have a lot of very short books on my bookshelf — the things that I’m trying to think about as I continue my own research.

Q: What are the stories behind your typewriters?

A: These three are all very special to me. This is not my entire typewriter collection, but these are three key examples. They all have stories — and I think they look good.

They’re from different eras. The black typewriter, the Underwood, is an early 20th-century typewriter, and they were made in the same factories that were manufacturing weapons for World War I. The way in which media technology and military technology have gone together, I think, is an interesting part of its story.

The seafoam-colored typewriter is called a portable Hermes, Hermes being the winged messenger. It’s heavy, but you could carry it around. I really like it for the literary connection. The portable Hermes is the typewriter fictionalized in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley — the one he used to forge identities.

The red typewriter, which is called the Valentine, is made by the Italian company Olivetti, and it’s an icon of 20th-century design. The case and the red, molded plastic typewriter have a really important design history, too.

When I moved to South Bend in 2009, there was still an open typewriter repair shop on Mishawaka Avenue. It’s since closed, but it made me feel like this town was a good home for me.

Q: When you’re sitting here, stuck with one of your projects, where do you look to get your mind rolling again?

I always look to the bookshelf. There are more novellas on this shelf than I could possibly write about in a single book, and I love to rearrange and move through them.

There’s a stack of the books that have been published in the book series I edit with the organization Post45 in the past few years. The theme of this series is literature and culture after 1945 — not necessarily explicitly American, but in the wake of the American century as a larger political and economic formation.

My second book, Novels by Aliens, came out a few weeks after I started the position as director of the Institute, so when I finally got to hold that book in my hands, I had just started working here in this office. The thesis of the book is that in the 21st century, there’s a desire for ways of seeing the world that are nonhuman. This is motivated by environmental concerns and ideas about agency that go beyond what has traditionally been understood as human.

I look at different interdisciplinary ways that this desire manifests in contemporary fiction and at its literary history. This is largely a story about genre, and one that I’ve continued to explore as I write my new book about the novella.

I also have a pile of all the objects I’ve found mudlarking. Mudlarking is when you walk along a river, specifically the Thames River in London, and you look for objects that wash up from the water that had been deposited or lost for years, even hundreds of years. You learn how to understand the tides, and you have to learn how to identify the things you find. I’ve found some clay pipes from different eras. One of them is Victorian and has a cricket bat design on it. Another is from the 18th century, and one is even older, probably from the 16th or 17th century. Two other pieces I have here are a fragment of a medieval shoe buckle and a fossilized tooth of either an older form of livestock or even some kind of larger animal — some of these teeth have been identified as belonging to mammoths.

Q: Your office has so many items from the past — what’s your newest piece?

The most recent addition to the office would probably be a very kitschy figurine of the statue of Athena from Nashville, Tennessee. There’s a huge replica of the Parthenon and the statue of Athena in Nashville, so I picked that up when I was giving a lecture at the humanities center of Vanderbilt University last year.

That’s next to a tiny Adirondack chair, which is probably a little bit older but is maybe my most valued possession in the office. I teach in the summers at a place called the Bread Loaf School of English. Most of the students in the program are high school teachers, and I teach literature there. I live in Robert Frost’s farmhouse, and I experiment with different ways of teaching literature that I bring back to my classroom here, too.

When you are awarded a chair at Bread Loaf — I was named the Frank and Eleanor Griffiths Chair in 2019 — you’re presented with a teeny-tiny Adirondack chair as a memento of that award. It lives here as a reminder of the institution and the other people across the country who also have this award.

Q: Do you have anything here from your students?

A: There are a few objects that have been made by my students over the years. That yellow and blue print is something made on the letterpress. It’s an excerpt that the student typed up from The Professor’s House by Willa Cather, which I taught in a graduate seminar. I also have this tiny work of book art that a student made.

The framed newspaper clippings were a gift from my first doctoral student. I started working with this student as her dissertation chair the year I came here, and she wrote a terrific dissertation about radio and modernism. And then when she left to take her job in New York, she left that with me as a memento of our time together.

It’s not everything, but keeping these objects in my Institute office helps me remember why we’re doing the work that we’re doing — supporting research, thinking about students, thinking about how we talk about the value of this work and really support it, both on campus and off. It’s nice to have some of those documents of students and ideas as a reminder for the why — why we do this work in the College.

Q: What serves as a good reminder in your office?

This image from an episode of The Twilight Zone called “Time Enough at Last,” which is the current working title for my book on the novella.

That picture is of the actor Burgess Meredith. In the show, his character is someone who’s a bookworm and feels like he doesn’t have any time to read. His home life doesn’t allow him to read, and neither does his job at a bank — his wife and supervisor get mad at him when he’s reading instead of working or doing anything else. So he’s beset with all of these problems with reading.

Then there’s a huge nuclear explosion or some kind of apocalyptic catastrophe, and he has locked himself in the bank vault to have time to read so no one can find him. He survives, and he comes out into a wasteland. There’s no one else in the world.

And then he finds the library, and this is the moment from which the title of the episode comes. He’s stacked up all the books in what order he’s going to read them in, and he says, “Books, books! Time enough at last!” And that’s exactly when he breaks his glasses.

That was the image that popped into my head when I got offered my job in the English department at Notre Dame in 2009. I wondered what was going to happen next, and I had so much joy, but I also knew that it would be something I shouldn’t take for granted.

Q: What’s changed since you moved to this office?

English professors are fairly solitary. You teach, you work with students in classrooms, and you work with students in your office, and then you occasionally come together as a department or work on a committee. The rest of the time you are writing and reading alone.

But when I started working in this institute, everything about my life was both enriched by and dependent on all of the amazing people who work here. I spend five days a week in this office, and it’s a very alive, very permeable space. We all fit in a pretty tight space where we work with undergraduates, we work with graduate students, we occasionally meet members of the community, we work with faculty. So we have a few different teams: people who work on faculty projects, a team that works on the student projects, a really amazing outreach and events team that’s helping us do a lot more of our public-facing work as well as shepherd our fellowship programs. It’s a very collaborative workplace.

It’s really extraordinary to be at a university that is investing in the humanities and the liberal arts. Humanities, arts, and social science research are central to Notre Dame’s mission not only for faculty, but also for graduates and undergraduates. That is absolutely galvanizing, but none of it is possible without an extraordinary group of people to make it happen — and the people in the Franco Institute are just really making it happen.