Research // College of Arts and Letters // College of Arts and Letters

Notre Dame Establishes Office of Postdoctoral Scholars

2013-05-17T14:00:00-04:00

To ensure that postdoctoral scholars in the early stages of their careers receive necessary resources, training, mentoring and comprehensive professional development support, the University of Notre Dame is forming an Office of Postdoctoral Scholars. The newly formed office will be administered through the Graduate School and is slated to open July 1.

Postdoctoral scholars are researchers who have received their Ph.D.s and who are undertaking additional training before assuming their professional careers, be it in the academy, industry, government, or nonprofit setting. There currently are 271 postdoctoral scholars at Notre Dame.

Building on a foundation put in place by the Office of Research—which formerly managed the appointments of postdoctoral scholars—the new office will consolidate services and provide additional professional development training and resources that will allow postdocs to flourish both at Notre Dame and beyond in their careers.

“The fact that the Office of Postdoctoral Scholars will report through the Graduate School signals Notre Dame’s recognition that postdoctoral appointments are developmental positions for scholars preparing for the next stage in their careers,” says Christine Maziar, acting dean of the Graduate School.

Primary functions of the office will include:

Serving as a central location for providing services aimed at postdoctoral scholars’ needs.
Developing a postdoc professional development program in partnership with the Graduate School Professional Development program that is focused on research, teaching, career and professional ethics.
Building a strong and interactive postdoctoral community through orientation, information sessions, workshops and social events.
Providing assistance to faculty with recruiting and hiring postdocs.
Providing oversight of postdoctoral appointment procedures and policies.
Serving as a resource for visa issues involving postdocs.

Learn More >

Originally published at news.nd.edu.

Sociologist Lyn Spillman Awarded Two Book Prizes

2013-05-17T11:10:00-04:00

Lyn Spillman, a professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Sociology, has been awarded two book prizes from the American Sociological Association for her work Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations (University of Chicago Press).

The Mary Douglas Prize honors the best book in the field of cultural sociology, and the Viviana Zelizer Award recognizes the best book in economic sociology.

Winning “best book” awards in both economic sociology and cultural sociology is no easy feat, says Professor Rory McVeigh, department chair. “It is not unlike producing a spirit of bipartisanship in Congress. It takes extraordinary scholarship to bridge these two fields of study so effectively.

“While winning these two awards is very impressive, I am quite certain that this is just the beginning in terms of awards and recognition for Solidarity in Strategy,” he adds. “This is one of those rare books that people will still be reading and discussing in sociology graduate seminars 50 years from now.”

Exploring New Territory

Solidarity in Strategy is one of the first in-depth explorations of the role of trade associations in economic culture.

Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Spillman compiled her own database of more than 4,400 associations. She then chose 25 groups to study further, collecting information about their activities and analyzing their business culture from multiple points of view.

According to Spillman, the function of trade associations is much more collegial than cutthroat. The primary focus of these disparate groups—including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the International Concrete Repair Institute—is to promote camaraderie, professionalism, and sociability. Her findings challenge the idea that capitalism is motivated solely by the pursuit of profit and self-interest.

“Even at the heart of capitalist business, culture is important,” she says. “A purely strategic approach isn’t sustainable.”

Affecting Economic Outcomes

Spillman has long been intrigued by economic sociology, she says. “As a sociologist, I’m struck by the fact that economic actions like working, buying, selling, saving, and giving are a fundamental part of everyday life. All spheres of society, from family to religion to politics, involve economic action, and social groups can affect economic outcomes.”

The financial crisis in 2008 brought a new wave of interest to the growing field, she says.

Capitalizing on that interest and drawing on her research for Solidarity in Strategy, Spillman designed and began teaching a new undergraduate class on economic sociology. “There is always great discussion in that class, and a nice mix of students, including business and economics majors as well as sociology majors.”

Spillman also brings her research into courses on cultural sociology, her primary area of interest and expertise. “Now, when I teach that,” she says, “I include a whole new topic—economic life—to explore how and why culture is important.”

Contributing to Two Fields

Spillman is continuing her work in economic sociology with two new research initiatives. One project, which builds on a theme from her book, explores how culture influences the degree to which people are driven by profit and self-interest.

The other project examines how the media presents economic issues. “I’m working together with a group exploring the norms and values that emerge when topics like foreign investment, financial innovations, corporate social responsibility, and inequality are discussed in the media,” she says.

In August, Spillman will attend the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting, where she will be presented with both prizes for Solidarity in Strategy.

“I’m thrilled and honored to win these awards,” she says. “I am a cultural sociologist first and foremost and wanted to make a contribution to both cultural and economic sociology.

“Economic sociology is such an exciting field right now, and the recognition of my colleagues really means a lot.”

with contributions from Sara Burnett

Learn More >

Ph.D. Student Pursues Old English at ND and Abroad

2013-05-16T14:00:00-04:00

Melissa Mayus at Iceland’s Gullfoss waterfall

Melissa Mayus never planned on specializing in Old English. The current English Ph.D. student took an Old English class as an undergraduate at Notre Dame that sparked an unexpected passion that has taken her all the way to Iceland.

“It ended up being a very challenging but also fascinating class,” she says. “I loved learning about how historical events and literature can change languages, and I loved finding a word that seemed completely unfamiliar and then being able to trace its history until it suddenly became a word in modern English that I used every day.”

Mayus graduated from the College of Arts and Letters with majors in both English and music history, and then went on to receive an M.A. in English from Saint Louis University. But she still wanted to know more about Old English, so she came back to Notre Dame to enroll in the Department of English’s doctorate program.

Now pursing her Ph.D., Mayus has received a Leifur Eiriksson Foundation Fellowship to spend the 2012-13 academic year at Háskóli Íslands, the University of Iceland, completing an additional master’s degree, this one in medieval Icelandic studies.

Old Norse and Old English

“I wanted to do the M.A. program to broaden my knowledge of Old Norse, since it’s very connected to Old English—and hopefully to gain the ability to teach Old Norse literature as well as Old English,” Mayus says.

“It’s an interdisciplinary degree, so I’m taking classes on medieval manuscript studies and old Nordic religions as well as doing intensive language work on Old Norse-Icelandic.”

Mayus says she was first exposed to Old Norse while at Saint Louis University and began learning it in order to read manuscripts in their original forms.

“I knew Old English and Old Norse were linguistically and historically intertwined in interesting ways,” she says. “With both languages, a definite bonus is simply being able to read the literature untranslated—all writing loses something in the translation, and sometimes even good translations inadvertently leave a lot out.”

While in Iceland, Mayus is also working on her dissertation for Notre Dame, which examines conceptions of free will in Old English literature, primarily in poetry, with comparisons to Old Norse literature.

Renowned Medieval Resources

Mayus says she chose to pursue a Ph.D. at Notre Dame because of its renowned faculty and resources in medieval studies, particularly the many medieval holdings in the Medieval Institute and Hesburgh Libraries.

And it was at Notre Dame that Mayus first discovered her passion for Old English, so it was only fitting that she return, she adds.

“My first Old English class was actually as an undergraduate,” she says, “so I might say that I never would have started in this field if Notre Dame didn’t have a strong selection of medieval classes.”

Learn More >

Nobody Likes a 'Fat-Talker,' Study Shows

2013-05-09T16:00:00-04:00

Women who engage in “fat talk”—the self-disparaging remarks girls and women make in relation to eating, exercise or their bodies—are less liked by their peers, a new study from the University of Notre Dame finds.

Led by Alexandra Corning, research associate professor of psychology and director of Notre Dame’s Body Image and Eating Disorder Lab, the study was presented recently at the Midwestern Psychological Association annual conference.

In the study, college-age women were presented with a series of photos of either noticeably thin or noticeably overweight women engaging in either “fat talk” or positive body talk; they were then asked to rate the women on various dimensions, including how likeable they were.

The women in the photos were rated significantly less likeable when they made “fat talk” statements about their bodies, whether or not they were overweight. The women rated most likeable were the overweight women who made positive statements about their bodies.

“Though it has become a regular part of everyday conversation, ‘fat talk’ is far from innocuous,” according to Corning.

“It is strongly associated with, and can even cause, body dissatisfaction, which is a known risk factor for the development of eating disorders.”

Although fat talk has been thought of by psychologists as a way women may attempt to initiate and strengthen their social bonds, Corning’s research finds that fat-talkers are liked less than women who make positive statements about their bodies.

“These findings are important because they raise awareness about how women actually are being perceived when they engage in this self-abasing kind of talk,” Corning says.

“This knowledge can be used to help national efforts to reduce ‘fat talking’ on college campuses.”

Learn More >

Originally published at news.nd.edu.

English Ph.D. Students Receive Prestigious Research Fellowship

2013-05-07T12:00:00-04:00

“When you’re working on a dissertation, you’re stuck in your own head a lot, so I wondered if anyone cares about this other than me,” says Hilary Fox, who received her Ph.D. from Notre Dame’s Department of English in 2012. “Having a group of people tell you, ‘Yes, we actually do care and find it really interesting and important,’ that’s a psychological boost.”

The Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Dissertation Completion Fellowship Fox received offered her that validation and quite a bit more. The fellowship awards exceptional doctoral candidates in the humanities a stipend and research funding to aid in the completion of a dissertation. ACLS awards just 65 fellowships per year nationwide.

Despite the competition, the English graduate program in the College of Arts and Letters has seen two of its scholars receive this honor in the past three years—Fox and current doctoral candidate Patrick Mello, who was awarded a fellowship for 2012-2013.

ACLS awards are quite difficult to earn, says Associate Professor Elliot Visconsi, director of graduate studies in the Department of English. “They’re a sign of exceptional distinction for the winners.”

“It’s a real testimony to the excellence of research that our students are doing, and it also reflects well on the department and all the faculty who have guided them,” he says. “We’re very proud of both of these students.”

Inside the Medieval Mind

Fox is currently a collegiate assistant professor and Harper-Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, a program that provides up to four years of funding for teaching and research in the liberal arts. She was surprised and encouraged, she says, to learn that she had been chosen as an ACLS fellow for 2010-11.

“It was a really fantastic honor not only to have my project recognized,” she says, “but to acknowledge the contribution that medieval studies can make to the humanities.”

Fox’s dissertation, “Mind, Body, Soul, and Self in the Alfredian Translations,” explores the main texts that have been associated with Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, and how they reveal the individual’s conception of—and place within—the medieval world. “I have always been interested in questions about how we think and experience our emotional, mental, and psychological lives,” she says.

In the course of her work, Fox discovered a source for the translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy that had not been previously identified by other scholars. “I worked out what the source was and realized no one had ever made this connection,” she says. “That was incredibly exciting; I had found something new.”

The support of the Mellon/ACLS Fellowship proved crucial to the completion of her dissertation. “It really gave me the time that I needed to write,” says Fox, “as well as research support for books and research materials that I was having trouble getting.”

The Department of English provided invaluable support as well. “There’s a strong sense of camaraderie and collegiality, especially among the medievalists,” says Fox. “You hear stories about super competitive departments, but here the conversation and the communication were great, and that really helped my work.”

In the postdoctoral world, Fox says, she continues to benefit from her experience as an ACLS fellow. “Because the ACLS is interdisciplinary, writing the dissertation completion application was fantastic practice in terms of talking to educated people who are not in your field,” she says. “You have to explain the peculiarities of your highly specific research topic to people who work in unrelated fields or time periods.”

Fox, who recently accepted a tenure-track position in medieval literature at Wayne State University, is grateful for that exposure. “That experience—and winning a national award open to people beyond my immediate discipline—gave me a lot of confidence,” she says.

Inside the 18th-Century Novel

Patrick Mello centers his research on more modern times: the 18th century. “I love the literature,” he says, “and I love the connections working in this time period allows you to draw between intellectual thought, literature, and the rise of periodicals, which are all coming together.”

His dissertation, “Toleration, Persecution, and the Novel,” focuses on how novels in this time period deal with the issues surrounding religious difference. “I take a look at pluralism and the social anxieties that directly influenced the formal development of the novel.”

Mello focuses on literature written after the Jacobite Rebellions in 1715 and 1745. “My dissertation argues that the novelistic preoccupation with character and community gave voice to both the continuing struggle for religious equality and the fear of writers like Henry Fielding and Robert Paltock that religious difference would ultimately lead to the downfall of the nation,” says Mello. “Moreover, reading persecution through the lens of toleration offers new insights into the development of cosmopolitanism.”

Mello says he honestly hadn’t expected to win an ACLS fellowship. “It is a very competitive award. You have to have a really strong project, faculty support and a little luck.”

Margaret Doody, John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature and former director of the College’s Ph.D. in Literature program, is Mello’s adviser. “She’s supportive and generous, and her work has been incredibly important to my dissertation.”

“It’s not often you find so many good people at the same university,” he adds. “There are few places that have this many quality 18th centuryists.”

The University and College have also been supportive of his work, Mello says, assisting him with grants to conduct primary source research at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Lincoln Archives Office in England’s Lincoln County. “That research was fundamental to me winning the award—there’s no doubt about that,” he says.

“It’s a real advantage to be here. A lot of universities don’t have the ability to support the students the way Notre Dame does. My dissertation would not be the same without that work.”

Now in the final stretch of his project, Mello says he appreciates all the opportunities the fellowship has offered him.

“It makes a huge difference,” he says. “It definitely opens up doors.”

Learn More >

Originally published at english.nd.edu.

Traumatized Moms Avoid Tough Talks With Kids, Study Shows

2013-05-07T10:00:00-04:00

Kristin Valentino

Mothers who have experienced childhood abuse, neglect or other traumatic experiences show an unwillingness to talk with their children about the child’s emotional experiences, a new study from the University of Notre Dame shows.

According to the study, which was presented at the Society for Research in Child Development 2013 Biennial Meeting in Seattle, a sample of low-income mothers who had experienced their own childhood traumas exhibited ongoing “traumatic avoidance symptoms,” which is characterized by an unwillingness to address thoughts, emotions, sensations, or memories of those traumas. This avoidance interfered with mothers’ ability to talk with their children about the child’s emotions, leading to shorter, less in-depth conversations; those mothers also used closed-end questions that did not encourage child participation.

“Traumatic avoidance symptoms have been shown to have a negative impact on the cognitive and emotional development of children,” says Notre Dame psychologist Kristin Valentino, who specializes in the development of at-risk and maltreated children. Valentino conducted the research with Notre Dame undergraduate Taylor Thomas.

“This research is important because it identifies a mechanism through which we can understand how maternal trauma history relates to her ability to effectively interact with her child. This finding also has implications for intervention work, since avoidance that is used as a coping mechanism is likely to further impair psychological functioning,” says Valentino, the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Assistant Professor of Psychology.

In a related study published recently in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect, Valentino found that maltreating parents, many of whom had experienced childhood trauma, could successfully be taught to use more elaborative and emotion-rich reminiscing with their preschool-aged children, which has been linked to a children’s subsequent cognitive abilities in a number of areas including memory, language, and literacy development.

Learn More>

Originally published at news.nd.edu.

Graduate Students Win NSF Fellowships

2013-05-06T14:10:00-04:00

The National Science Foundation recently announced the winners of the 2013 Graduate Research Fellowship Program, with nine current Notre Dame students winning the prestigious award—including three from the College of Arts and Letters—and another nine earning honorable mention. This year’s nine winners equal the total number of winners from Notre Dame over the last seven years combined.

The NSF GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based degrees. The award provides a stipend, tuition support, and research funds for three years.

Caroline Byrd

Department – Advisor: Psychology Department (Developmental) – Dr. Nicole McNeil

Project: “Are the Beneficial Effects of Gesture on Learning Due to Eye Movements?”

Brief description: Research has shown that asking children to mimic specific gestures prior to instruction on math equivalence problems helps them generate and maintain correct problem-solving strategies. These findings support the idea that gesturing facilitates learning; however, the gestures children have mimicked in previous studies have all been relational gestures that move children’s attention back and forth across the equal sign. In my project, I will test the hypothesis that the benefits of these gestures are not due to gesture per se, but rather, are due to the eye movements that accompany the gestures. Research conducted with adults indicates that looking back and forth across the equal sign is correlated with correct strategies to solve math equivalence problems. Research also shows that participants’ eye movements predict correct problem solving and that directing eye movements in a pattern that embodies a correct solution leads to successful problem solving. If gesture facilitates learning by eliciting certain eye movements, then this would advance theory and provide educators with a guiding principle for designing learning materials.

Career Goals: My career goal is to be immersed in research at either a major research institution or an educational research organization. Ultimately, my long-term goal is to conduct research that contributes to improvements in instructional methods that advance children’s mathematical understanding.

Patrick Miller

Department – Adviser: Psychology (Quantitative) – Dr. Gitta Lubke

Project: “Searching through multiple haystacks: A statistical learning method for finding important predictors in high dimensional data with multivariate outcomes.”

Brief Description: In my lab, we are generally interested in understanding the impact of genetics on psychological disorders. One approach that we use is to find sites of genetic variation (nucleotide polymorphisms) that are associated with these disorders. The effect of each polymorphism is very small, so I propose to develop and evaluate a new statistical method that might give us more power to detect these effects. One additional benefit of the research is that the method could be used more generally for variable selection with multivariate outcomes, where the number of potential predictors far exceeds the sample size.

Career Goals: My goal is to develop and use novel statistical methods to help address substantive questions in psychology or other social sciences.

Enma Pardilla-Delgado

Department – Advisor: Psychology (Cognition, Brain & Behavior) – Dr. Jessica Payne

Project: “How sleep influence the memory for gist over the long term?”

Brief Description: My project investigates how sleeping (and sleep architecture) right after learning affects two different types of memory over the course of 24 and 48 hours. More importantly, I want to know how sleep and the physiological correlates of sleep affect our memory for the gist (or main theme) of events. It has been shown that gist memories persist over time while memories for specific details decay. My research investigates whether this “gist persistence” is dependent or related to sleep right after learning.

Career Goals: I plan to eventually become a full-time professor mainly focused on research and ideally I would study sleep and memory in Puerto Rico, where no one is currently doing research in this field. I am also very interested in the scientific study of dreaming and its relationship to memory.

Graduate Support

Students applying for NSF awards create a research plan for the fellowship program in conjunction with their adviser. The rise in awards won by Notre Dame students corresponds to an increased effort from the Graduate School to both provide one-on-one consultations and group support for students throughout the external funding process, including finding opportunities, writing and revising proposals, and submitting formal applications.

As part of this increased effort, Gretchen Busl, Associate Program Director for Grants and Fellowships, has conducted a summer support program, a fall workshop series and an intensive fellowship “boot camp” each fall and spring break. Among this year’s nine winners, five participated in the summer session, with two of those also taking part in the fall boot camp, and two others working through the fall workshop series.

In addition to the three winners from Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology, six graduate students from the College of Science were honored:

Jennifer Arceo, Chemistry & Biochemistry (Analytical Chemistry);
Eric DeLeon, Biological Sciences (Physiology);
Rachel Schluttenhofer, Biological Sciences (Microbiology);
Shayna Sura, Biological Sciences (Ecology);
Victoria Tomiczek, Engineering (Civil Engineering); and
Carmella Vizza, Biological Sciences (Ecology)

Learn More >

Child’s Counting Comprehension May Depend on Objects Counted, Study Shows

2013-05-06T14:00:00-04:00

Concrete objects—such as toys, tiles, and blocks—that students can touch and move around, called manipulatives, have been used to teach basic math skills since the 1980s. Use of manipulatives is based on the long-held belief that young children’s thinking is strictly concrete in nature, so concrete objects are assumed to help them learn math concepts.

However, new research from the University of Notre Dame suggests that not all manipulatives are equal. The types of manipulatives may make a difference in how effectively a child learns basic counting and other basic math concepts. The study will be published in the May edition of Child Development.

University of Notre Dame Associate Professor of Psychology Nicole McNeil, who researches how children think, learn, and solve problems in mathematics, together with Notre Dame graduate student Lori Petersen found that use of certain objects have mixed results with preschoolers, particularly if those objects are rich in perceptual detail (bright and shiny).

Objects that are brightly colored, unusually textured, or highly dimensional may capture children’s attention and help children stay focused on the given task. However, the researchers found that when children already were familiar with the objects, then these perceptually detailed objects actually hindered performance on counting tasks because they require dual representation—they must be represented both as objects themselves and as the abstract mathematical concept they are intended to represent.

When children already have established knowledge of the objects, this increased attention often is directed to the objects and their known purpose rather than to the mathematical task at hand. Conversely, when children didn’t have established knowledge of the objects, perceptual richness helped performance.

“These findings suggest that it is easier for children to use objects in mathematical tasks when those objects have maximum ‘bling’ and minimum recognizability,” McNeil said.

“More generally, these findings suggest that teachers may benefit from taking children’s previous knowledge into account when deciding which materials to bring into their classrooms.”

Learn More >

Originally published at news.nd.edu.

New Study: Risk Factor for Depression Can be 'Contagious'

2013-04-30T15:35:00-04:00

According to a new study from the University of Notre Dame, a particular style of thinking that makes people vulnerable to depression actually can be “contagious” to others and increase their symptoms of depression six months later.

The study, conducted by Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gerald Haeffel and former Notre Dame undergraduate student Jennifer Hames ’09, is published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

Research on depression has shown that people who interpret stressful life events as the result of factors they can’t change and as a reflection of their own deficiency are more vulnerable to depression. This “cognitive vulnerability” has been shown to be such a potent risk factor for depression that it can predict who is likely to experience a depressive episode in the future, even if they have never been depressed before.

Though cognitive vulnerability has been shown to solidify in early adolescence and remain stable throughout adulthood, Haeffel theorized that it may be malleable or “contagious” during major life transitions when our environments are in flux.

He tested this hypothesis by tracking 103 pairs of randomly assigned college roommates, all of whom were first-year students. During their first month on campus, the roommates completed a questionnaire that measured their cognitive vulnerability and depressive symptoms. They completed the same questionnaire three months and six months later, and also completed a measure of stressful life events.

The findings provide striking evidence for the contagion effect, confirming the researcher’s initial hypothesis: The results revealed that the first year students who were randomly assigned to a roommate with high levels of cognitive vulnerability were likely to “catch” their roommate’s cognitive style and develop higher levels of cognitive vulnerability; those assigned to roommates who had low initial levels of cognitive vulnerability experienced decreases in their own levels. The contagion effect was evident at both the three-month and six-month assessments.

The most striking finding showed that changes in cognitive vulnerability impacted the risk for future depressive symptoms: Students who showed an increase in cognitive vulnerability in the first three months of college had nearly twice the level of depressive symptoms at six months than those who did not show such an increase.

“Our findings suggest that it may be possible to use an individual’s social environment as part of the intervention process, either as a supplement to existing cognitive interventions or possibly as a stand-alone intervention,” according to Haeffel.

“Our study demonstrates that cognitive vulnerability has the potential to wax and wane over time depending on the social context, which means that cognitive vulnerability should be thought of as plastic rather than immutable.”

Learn More >

Originally published at news.nd.edu.

Theology Professor Wins Luce Fellowship

2013-04-29T13:00:00-04:00

Notre Dame theologian Yury Avvakumov, second from right, was recently selected as one of six Henry Luce III Fellows in Theology

Yury P. Avvakumov, an assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Theology, was recently selected as one of six Henry Luce III Fellows in Theology for his work on the relationship between the Latin West and Byzantine East during the 12th century.

The Luce Fellows program, established with the support of the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS) and The Henry Luce Foundation, annually funds a small number of promising theological pursuits. The fellows whose projects are chosen devote a year to research and then present their findings at the annual Luce Fellows Conference. Established in 1993, the Luce Fellows Program has awarded just 136 fellowships in its 20-year existence.

“The good news from the Luce Foundation came as an enormous and, of course, very joyful surprise,” says Avvakumov. “I did not expect to win because I realized how tough the competition was.”

Investigating the Origins of Division

Avvakumov’s winning proposal, “Latin West and Byzantine East in the 12th Century: Christians, Churches, and Theologies between 1054 and 1204,” analyzes the relationship between the two regions during a period of ecclesiastical upheaval.

“I seek to identify the major events of church history, the personalities, and the ecclesiastical-political and theological issues that determined East-West relations in that period,” he says. “The 12th century should be seen as a period of ambiguity, as a unique and fascinating time of contingencies and possibilities still open for positive developments—even if most of them were unhappily lost in the early 13th century.”

As a Byzantine Rite Catholic, the topic holds special meaning for Avvakumov. “The Christians of today live in a world divided into denominations,” he says. “We have made ourselves at home in this world; we have become accustomed to thinking ‘denominationally.’”

As a result, he says, many Western Christians tend to ignore their Eastern counterparts, while Eastern Christians attempt to demonize Roman Catholics. “The attitudes here and there might be different; however, the lack of real knowledge and understanding is what unites both opposite extremes.”

Bridging East and West

Avvakumov has lived and learned in both extremes. He received his first doctorate in Orthodox theology from St. Petersburg Orthodox Theological School and the second, in Catholic theology, from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

He then taught at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, which is the only Catholic university in the former Soviet Union. Prior to coming to Notre Dame, Avvakumov also held numerous academic, administrative, and pastoral positions in Russia, Germany, and the Ukraine.

An accomplished linguist, Avvakumov has published five books in three languages—German, Italian, and Ukrainian. His research interests include medieval Church history, ecclesiology, and sacramental theology, as well as the history of Russian and Ukrainian religious thought in the 19th and 20th centuries and the history of the Eastern Catholic Churches from medieval times to present day.

Seeking a Better Understanding

Avvakumov hopes that his Luce Fellows project shows an acknowledgement of the gap in understanding between Eastern and Western Christian traditions.

“I think the fact that a project about East-West relations has been selected among the winning projects may be seen as a positive sign of interest towards this important area of research.”

Learn More >

Catherine Reidy Named a Clarendon Scholar

2013-04-25T15:40:00-04:00

Catherine Reidy, a University of Notre Dame senior majoring in psychology with a minor in anthropology, has been awarded a Clarendon Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Oxford.

Reidy, a Rhodes Scholar finalist, will use the scholarship to study for her master’s degree in African Studies starting in October.

The highly selective scholarship awards full tuition, fees and a stipend to students studying at Oxford. These scholarships are awarded on the basis of academic excellence and potential across all subjects at graduate level at Oxford. In 2012-13, more than 300 Clarendon scholars from more than 50 different countries are attending Oxford, including Tracey Jennings ’10, who majored in Classics in the College of Arts and Letters.

Since her freshman year at Notre Dame, Reidy has focused her academic work on international research. In the spring of her first year, she was awarded a Kellogg Institute for International Studies internship in India. She was accepted into the Kellogg International Scholars Program, which allowed her to begin undergraduate research as a sophomore.

At the end of her sophomore year, Reidy received a Kellogg Experiencing the World Fellowship and spent the summer in Makeni, Sierra Leone, where she began a research project studying politics and youth in Makeni. She returned to Sierra Leone in her junior year after winning a Kellogg/Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies research grant to study the effects of violence and civil war on the future orientations and goals of the youth. Reidy also studied in Dublin during her junior year in fall 2011.

Reidy became involved in a psychology lab in her senior year that centers on ethnic tensions between Croatian and Serbian children in integrated schools in post-conflict Croatia. She traveled to Croatia in the spring of her senior year to conduct research for her senior thesis, which focuses on this issue.

An officer in the International Development Research Council during her first three years on campus, Reidy is currently the student coordinator of the Kellogg Institute’s Africa Working Group. She is research assistant to Catherine Bolten, assistant professor of anthropology and peace Studies, through Kellogg’s International Scholars Program.

Reidy’s Clarendon Scholarship was made possible in part through her participation in Notre Dame’s Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement (CUSE). CUSE provides undergraduate students in all the University’s colleges opportunities for research, scholarship, and creative projects. The center also assists them in finding faculty mentors, funding and venues for the publication or presentation of their work, and promotes applications to national Fellowship programs and prepares them in their application process.

Learn More >

Originally published at news.nd.edu.

Fighting for Democracy and Policy Change in Latin America

2013-04-23T17:00:00-04:00

Just as the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas on January 1, 1994, was a turning point in Mexico’s history, it was a turning point for Guillermo Trejo, associate professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science and a faculty fellow in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

Until that January, Trejo’s goal was to learn everything he could about the economics of poverty in his native Mexico and what policies might best alleviate it, with what he describes as a “top-down” orientation.

After the extraordinary events of that day—when after years of peaceful mobilization and land struggle, an estimated 3,000 armed Mayan peasants launched a major military offensive against the Mexican government on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect—his perspective changed.

“It was a jolt,” he recounts. “It forced me to ask myself, why don’t you try to understand what the poor themselves are doing to overcome poverty?”

“I decided to try to understand collective action, social movements, and armed insurgencies,” he says. “I focused on indigenous peoples—the population segment facing the harshest levels of economic discrimination in Mexico—and that led me into the study of politics.”

Formerly a faculty member at Mexico’s CIDE (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas) and then Duke University, Trejo came to Notre Dame in fall 2012 as associate professor of political science.

Whether he chooses as his lens the role of indigenous people in late 20th-century Mexico or, his topic now—the pervasive problem of organized crime in Latin America, his focus and passion is understanding democracy.

“Most fundamentally,” he says, “my research fits into the study of political change, democratization, and how democracies work.”

From Activist Roots

With a grandmother who lived through Mexico’s Cristero War in the 1920s, Trejo grew up listening to stories about religion, violence, war, and displacement.

He was active in pro-democracy movements and demonstrations as a politicized college student in Mexico City in the late 1980s and during his college years joined Jesuit missionaries in grassroots organizing of urban, rural, and indigenous movements in Mexico City, Coahuila, and Veracruz.

While teaching and researching at CIDE from 1997 to 2005, Trejo was involved in discussions of the peace process in Chiapas and of indigenous rights elsewhere. He was also a regular participant in the quarterly meetings of SERAPAZ (Service for the Peace), an organization founded by the late Bishop of Chiapas Samuel Ruiz to bring together leaders of social and indigenous movements and human rights NGOs for dialogue on challenges and strategies for local and national political action.

“Being socially and politically active has led me to ask fundamental questions about politics, about autocracies at work, and about how people defy authoritarian rule,” Trejo says.

The True Role of Indigenous Peoples in Mexico’s Democratization

In his recent book, Popular Movements in Autocracies: Religion, Repression, and Indigenous Collective Action in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Trejo analyzes a major cycle of indigenous protest that took place in Mexico as the country transitioned from authoritarian rule to democracy and shows the crucial role that indigenous mobilization had in Mexico’s democratization.

As has been true in many other authoritarian regimes, Trejo says, religion played a major role in the rise of an independent civil society in Mexico. There, the Catholic Church vigorously promoted indigenous networks and movements for land redistribution and indigenous rights in areas where US Protestant missionaries had become active.

“The competition for souls,” he says, “led prominent Catholic bishops and priests to build the social infrastructure for the mobilization of Mexico’s most marginalized and excluded ethnic minority groups.”

As has also been true in many other authoritarian regimes, he says, religious networks contributed to different kinds of collective action in Mexico—to non-violent indigenous protest but also to armed insurgency.

By collecting and analyzing data from 20 states and 883 counties or municipalities from 1975 through 2000—in places where protest and rebellion occurred and where they did not—Trejo demonstrates that whether peaceful protest became armed rebellion depended less on religion than on how authoritarian rulers dealt with dissident movements.

“While peasant indigenous movements in Mexico had mobilized for years over land redistribution,” he says, “peaceful protest turned violent, as it did in Chiapas in 1994, when local politicians relied on repressive measures to implement an ambitious and unpopular national agricultural reform that put an end to six decades of land reform and liberalized land tenure.”

“When fundamental rights are violently taken away from people, they tend to radicalize. And that is true of indigenous movements in El Salvador in 1979 or Algeria in 1991 or Chiapas in 1994.”

“Social protest and local rebellions can lead to civil war but, other times, to democratization,” Trejo suggests. A key claim of his book is that counter to previous explanations of Mexico’s democratization, Mexican elites relinquished controls over elections and consented to free and fair elections only after the Chiapas rebellion. Elites democratized elections to avoid a generalized uprising.

Why Peace in Some Democracies but Violence in Others?

For the past two years, Trejo has turned his attention to a new democracy puzzle—one that is important to solve for both scholars and citizens.

“So many fought so hard and so long to democratize Mexico and other Latin American countries,” he observes. “One would expect democracy to produce development, peace, and a good quality of life.”

Yet, he points out, with the surge in recent years of organized crime—drug trafficking, racketeering, mafias, private militias, and paramilitary groups—Mexico and other countries in Latin America are experiencing unprecedented levels of criminal violence.

According to Trejo, organized crime in Mexico alone has been responsible for 70,000 deaths, 20,000 disappearances, and the displacement of 150,000 people in the last six years. The number of deaths, he says, is higher than at any time since the Mexican Revolution and five times higher than the typical number of deaths in civil wars around the world during the 20th century.

“While we need to know how we got here and what can we do to get out,” he says, “the overarching question is: why do some democracies produce peace and development and others the opposite?”

The Importance for the Rule of Law of Reframing Security Systems

Trejo’s working hypothesis is that answers hinge on the quality of the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy.

“When transitions primarily address elections without concurrently reframing security systems,” he believes, “violence is pervasive.”

“Those countries that adopted democratic rule simultaneously with competitive elections and judicial reform, punished corruption and human rights violations that occurred under autocratic rule, and also transformed their military and police forces, have not experienced the levels of violence of those that failed to take these actions.”

Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and Paraguay are countries he points to as failing to take the necessary actions. All have witnessed major expansions of organized crime and violence.

Chile, Uruguay, and Nicaragua, on the other hand, are examples of countries that did reframe their security systems successfully—and remain relatively peaceful.

“Nicaragua is instructive,” Trejo says. “The series of major security reforms that the Sandinistas and the post-Sandinista governments introduced, particularly the development of powerful community-level police forces, have helped the country resist the expansion of Mexican drug cartels and have kept levels of criminal violence at much lower levels than its neighbors.”

Just as he used a rigorous comparative analysis to drill down to answers in his study of the role of indigenous people and protests in Mexico’s democratization, Trejo is building a major dataset on subnational organized crime violence in Mexico and a cross-national dataset on organized crime and homicides for all countries that democratized in the past 35 years.

The Policy Implications of Trejo’s Scholarship

In addition to its scholarly implications, there are profound policy implications for both Trejo’s past and current work.

“As a Mexican citizen living and working in the US,” he says, “I’m committed to social science and theory-building, but I’m also deeply committed to how both can contribute to change policies and realities in Mexico and Latin America. I can’t divorce what I do as a scholar from its impact on policy.”

He believes that the lessons of his first book are instructive for Mexico’s current leaders.

“Mexico is a democracy now—although a contested and complicated and fragile democracy with lots of violence. As its new leaders embark on major constitutional, legal, and institutional reforms, they would find many lessons in my book on how to implement unpopular policies without leading the country into a major rebellion.”

As organized crime violence continues to escalate across Latin America, the policy implications for Trejo’s new research project are even more evident—for both policymakers and citizens, he maintains.

“We’re facing a generational challenge of building effective and accountable security forces, police forces, military forces, and the foundation of the rule of law,” he says. “People are coming to understand that attention to the rule of law is not just something for governments. Business leaders and communities must be involved as well.”

Last year, Trejo took part in a workshop organized by the Universidad Loyola del Pacífico on how citizens and communities can engage in conflict resolution and peace building in the midst of crime and violence. Held in Acapulco, participants were academics, politicians, religious leaders, members of grassroots organizations, and families of victims of organized crime.

“The early findings of my research on the importance of reframing security systems were crucial for this workshop,” he says. “There is a tremendous need for information, for understanding, in Mexico.”

Finding a Home at Kellogg

Given Trejo’s intertwined goals of scholarship and policy, he says that the Kellogg Institute and Notre Dame as a whole are proving to be “an ideal environment” for him.

“This is one place where science and policy can come together in a very natural way,” he observes.

“Kellogg’s tradition of combining state-of-the-art research in the humanities and social sciences with country- or region-specific scholarship is unique. In many of the most influential world-class universities, social sciences and area studies are at odds. They are not at Kellogg.”

Kellogg returns the compliment wholeheartedly.

“Recruiting Guillermo to Kellogg and Notre Dame,” says Associate Professor of History and Kellogg Faculty Fellow Ted Beatty “has helped boost our capacity to think about Mexico and has already helped catalyze an exciting range of visitors, seminars, and workshops focused on that country.”

“Most importantly, Guillermo’s arrival helps us ensure that one of the world’s great places to study Latin American and comparative politics will maintain its reputation well into the future.”

Learn More >

Originally published at kellogg.nd.edu

Four Arts and Letters Faculty Receive ACLS Fellowships

2013-04-23T15:10:00-04:00

Four professors from Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters have been awarded American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowships for the 2013-14 academic year.

Katherine Brading, William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Professor of Philosophy and director of the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) graduate program in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, for “Theoretical Physics as a Contribution of Philosophy;”
Catherine Cangany in the Department of History for “An Empire of Fakes: Counterfeit Goods in Eighteenth-Century America;”
David Hernandez, assistant professor in the Department of Classics, for “Butrint Archaeological Research Project: The Roman Forum;” and
Xiaoshan Yang, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, for “Wang Anshi and the Song Poetic Sensibility.”

Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other institutions, ACLS Fellowships serve as salary replacement for professors who wish to conduct six to 12 continuous months of full-time research.

The competition these fellowships is fierce, notes Ken Garcia, associate director for the College’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts. The ACLS received 1,121 fellowship applications nationwide and made only 65 awards—a success rate of only 5.8 percent.

“I am honored and thrilled to receive this tremendous help for my research,” says Hernández, who, in addition to the ACLS fellowship, has recently been awarded a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a fellowship from Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation.

The ongoing scholarship of the College’s faculty has a strong record of attracting research funding from private foundations, corporations, and the federal government. Over the past decade, the number of faculty who have received major national fellowships in the arts, humanities, and social sciences places Notre Dame among the top six universities in the nation.

Learn More >

Chinese Poetry Expert Receives Research Fellowship

2013-04-22T17:00:00-04:00

Xiaoshan Yang, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in Notre Dame’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship for the 2013-14 academic year.

“Chinese poetry is a significant component of Chinese culture. It is known both for its antiquity and for its continuity,” says Yang, who specializes in classical Chinese poetry and poetics. “ So I was both excited and humbled to receive the award.”

His current research, part of a developing book project, focuses on the poetic practice of Wang Anshi, an 11th century Song Dynasty poet.

“Classical Chinese poetry reached its golden age in the Tang dynasty,” Yang says. “From the second half of the 11th century onward, Song (dynasty) poets exhibited a growing anxiety over being late comers to a field in which artistic possibilities appeared to have been all but exhausted.

“This sense of belatedness motivated their search for alternatives that would enable them to embrace as well as to differ from the Tang masters. As a result, a new poetic sensibility developed,” he says. “Wang Anshi was one of the first major Song poets to approach Tang poetry as a source of inspiration and sustenance while acutely aware of its overwhelming power.”

Yang’s research has previously won support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, which sponsors Chinese studies in the humanities and social sciences overseas.

Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the NEH, among other institutions, ACLS Fellowships serve as salary replacement for professors who wish to conduct 6 to 12 continuous months of full-time research. Yang was one of 65 fellows selected out of a pool of more than 1,000 applicants.

Four of the 65 winners this year are faculty in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters. In addition to Yang, ACLS fellowships have been awarded to:

Katherine Brading, William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Professor of Philosophy and director of the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) graduate program in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, for “Theoretical Physics as a Contribution of Philosophy;”
Catherine Cangany in the Department of History for “An Empire of Fakes: Counterfeit Goods in Eighteenth-Century America;” and
David Hernandez, assistant professor in the Department of Classics, for “Butrint Archaeological Research Project: The Roman Forum.”

Learn More>

Philosophy Professor Awarded ACLS Fellowship for Work on Newton

2013-04-22T17:00:00-04:00

The American Council of Learned Societies has awarded a 2013 fellowship to Katherine Brading, William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Collegiate Professor of Philosophy in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters and director of the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) graduate program in the University’s Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values.

Brading received the ACLS fellowship for a research project called “Theoretical Physics as a Contribution of Philosophy,” which features Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most influential scientists of all time, as its central figure.

“Not many philosophers read Newton these days, and I think that’s a mistake,” Brading says.

“Part of what I want to do is to demonstrate the depth and range of Newton’s philosophical engagement and the novelty of his solutions. Then, by following his proposals through into contemporary philosophy and physics, I want to show how important they are—and help re-integrate Newton into the history of philosophy as we tell it today.”

Philosophy of Physics

Newton has a strong presence in Brading’s classroom instruction as well as her research. Brading mainly teaches philosophy of physics, both to undergraduates and graduates, and last semester taught a course on 17th century cosmology which culminates with Newton. This semester, she is teaching a graduate seminar, Historical and Conceptual Foundations of Space-Time Theory, which began with Descartes and Newton.

“I’m interested in the ways in which physics engages with some of our oldest and deepest philosophical questions about what the world’s made of and how it works,” she says. “This is important not just for contemporary philosophy but also because how we make sense of ourselves and the world around us today depends on how we tell ourselves our history—social, cultural, intellectual, and so on.

“It’s a part of what makes us who we are.”

Brading was one of four faculty members from the College of Arts and Letters to win ACLS awards this year. She is joined by Catherine Cangany in the Department of History for “An Empire of Fakes: Counterfeit Goods in Eighteenth-Century America,” David Hernandez in the Department of Classics for “Butrint Archaeological Research Project: The Roman Forum,” and Xiaoshan Yang in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures for “Wang Anshi and the Song Poetic Sensibility.”

ACLS received 1,121 applications this year, from which only 65 award winners were selected, according to Ken Garcia, associate director of the College’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

Support for Research

“This project has been brewing for a very long time, but it’s the kind of thing where I needed more than a few hours here and there to continue moving it forward,” Brading says. “Being able to have concentrated research time makes all the difference. I’m grateful and excited.”

In addition to her Newton research project, Brading has published works on Hilbert and the early history of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, as well as on structuralist approaches to physics and symmetries in physics.

Another ongoing collaborative project, she says, involves the University’s Digital Visualization Theater (DVT).

“Kepler had this amazing theory that the structure underlying the Copernican system and responsible for the distances between the planets was a set of regular solids nested inside one another,” she says. “We’ve built his model of the cosmos in the DVT, complete with all the nested solids, and we get to fly around it. We’ve also replicated observations that Galileo made, and we’re building Tycho Brahe’s instruments in there, and so on.

“This project came out of my cosmology undergraduate class, and there’s a bunch of us working on it. It’s a lot of fun, and we like sharing these materials whenever we get the chance.”

Learn More >

Historian Wins ACLS Fellowship to Research Counterfeit Goods

2013-04-22T17:00:00-04:00

Catherine Cangany can’t stop thinking about fakes. Luckily, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) doesn’t want her to stop. Cangany recently won an ACLS fellowship for her proposed research project “An Empire of Fakes: Counterfeit Goods in Eighteenth-Century America,” which will analyze counterfeit goods travelling around the Americas during the colonial period.

With the grant, Cangany will take the next year to conduct research in London, Boston, New York, and Charleston, S.C. She also won a six-month fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to research at the John Carter Brown Library in Rhode Island.

Cangany, an assistant professor in the Department of History, says she was shocked to win the ACLS fellowship. “It’s not often that ACLS funds brand new projects so I was not expecting it at all,” she says. “I was stunned but I’m thrilled.”

Exploring the Underground

Her research is grounded in the past, Cangany says, but it is a topic that resonates today.

“These counterfeit goods have a lot to tell us about economies and cultural practices, and the way people evaluated merchandise they were bombarded with all day long,” she says. “That’s something people are still facing in 2013.”

Cangany’s interest in the colonial period began when she once lived in Washington, D.C., and spent her spare time visiting historic sites. Her budding interest compelled her to return to graduate school and study history. While at the University of Michigan, Cangany completed her dissertation on colonial Detroit.

Part of her research for that project involved a look at counterfeit moccasins. “I enjoyed that needle in a haystack work so much that I decided to continue it,” she says.

While hard to track down, fakes were surprisingly common, she says. “Probably more than half of the transactions in the colonial period were illegal. Counterfeit goods are a really interesting way to think about the underground economy and the exchanges that were not recognized or regulated by government.”

Cangany has to be creative in her research, given that underground goods are by nature undocumented and difficult to track down. “I’m looking at administrative records both in Europe and the Americas,” she says. “There are records such as treasury papers, customs papers, and newspaper reports (what we might call ‘buyer beware’ notices) that all contain references to fakes. It’s a piecemeal project that depends on a whole bunch of sources.”

Delving Into Archives

Cangany says she is eager to dive into her new research. “I’m going to miss teaching, but I’m really looking forward to being back in the archives.”

In fact, she says, her favorite part of any history project is the archival work.

“It can be such a thrill when you are surrounded by this old paper, working through it, and you find something you did not expect to be there or that conforms a hypothesis you had,” she says. “Trawling through those documents and finding something really incredible is a great feeling.”

Wherever her project takes her, Cangany is in good company. This year, three other faculty members in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters have been awarded ACLS fellowships.

Katherine Brading, William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and director of the History and Philosophy of Science graduate program in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, for “Theoretical Physics as a Contribution of Philosophy;”
David Hernandez, assistant professor in the Department of Classics, for “Butrint Archaeological Research Project: The Roman Forum;” and
Xiaoshan Yang, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, for “Wang Anshi and the Song Poetic Sensibility.”

The ACLS selected just 65 winners from among 1,121 applications this year.

“It’s really an honor,” Cangany says.

Learn More >

Junior Economics Major Finds Home in Honors Program

2013-04-22T09:00:00-04:00

Luke Pardue says he was looking for a “sense of family” when considering which college to attend. He found it at Notre Dame through the John and Barbara Glynn Family Honors program.

“The opportunities that the honors program offers—from smaller seminar-style classes to summer research funding—made the opportunity to study at Notre Dame that much more attractive,” he says.

The Glynn program provides special seminars, field trips, and mentoring opportunities for 100 of the most promising scholars in each incoming class. It also provides summer funding to conduct original research.

Now a junior economics major, Pardue says his experience in the program has lived up to all his expectations.

“My friends in the Glynn program are some of the first friends I made at Notre Dame. Our common first-year classes allowed us all to get to know each other, creating a community of passionate students. And even as these common classes stopped, the community of the honors program remained,” he says.

Experiences to Remember

Glynn Scholars fulfill most of their University requirements in small honors seminars during their first two years. As they begin to pursue their majors, their courses still tend to be small, discussion-based classes. The Glynn program then culminates with a senior thesis: a yearlong research or creative project in which students have the opportunity to work one-on-one with a faculty mentor.

Along the way, says Pardue, he has been able to form close relationships with Glynn faculty members, such as Paul Weithman, professor of philosophy and director of the interdisciplinary Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) minor. Pardue is also pursuing a PPE minor.

“The first class I had at Notre Dame in the fall of freshman year was Introduction to Philosophy, taught by Professor Weithman,” he says. “Because the class was less than 20 people, I was able to develop a close relationship with him. He is someone I have taken several more classes with and still talk to when I need advice.”

Outside of the honors program, Pardue is involved with Hall Government, First Undergraduate Experience in Leadership (FUEL), and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies’ Scholars Program, which pairs students with faculty fellows as research assistants. He is also currently spending a semester abroad at Oxford University.

Plans for the Future

After graduation, Pardue says he would like to pursue a Ph.D. in economics, in part because of research he did last summer.

With funding from Kellogg, he went to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to study economic development and work with BRAC, an organization dedicated to alleviating poverty by empowering the poor

“I spent part of my time helping to apply rigorous economic analysis to different anti-poverty programs, evaluating these projects to gain a better understanding of their effects on those involved,” he says. “It opened my eyes to a reality I had only read about. I realized how complicated issues which look simple enough in a textbook can be in real life and that there are no simple solutions to the problems of global poverty and international development.”

His experiences in Bangladesh will also play a large part in his honors thesis, Pardue says, adding that the honors program overall has taught him to look in new and unexpected ways at all sorts of complex problems.

“My favorite course at Notre Dame so far was the Contemporary Political Philosophy class offered to sophomores in the honors program,” he says. “It showed me that philosophy is a discipline with applications not just for questions about truth and existence but also for practical questions.

“The course forced me to develop analytical skills in ways I didn’t think I could.”

Learn More >

Giving Voice to the Voiceless in Rural Mali

2013-04-18T09:00:00-04:00

From the beginning of their joint research on political participation in rural Mali, Notre Dame political scientist Jaimie Bleck and Kellogg Institute for International Studies Visiting Fellow Kristin Michelitch were interested in the voices of voiceless citizens.

Mali had experienced two decades of democratic rule but mass illiteracy, gender inequality, and elite control of political knowledge meant that many rural citizens, especially women, had little real role in the political process.

“Many people don’t speak the language of politics, which limits their engagement with the state,” says Bleck, a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow and Ford Family Assistant Professor of Political Science. Even more fundamentally, villagers do not have enough independent knowledge of national politics to express opinions with peers.

“Traditional elites in rural Islamic Africa, such as village chiefs and imams, act as information gatekeepers,” explains Michelitch. “They can dictate or influence villagers’ opinions and behaviors, leading to village block-voting in elections.”

For Bleck and Michelitch, such practices raised questions about marginalized citizens’ political autonomy as well as their ability to improve their economic well-being.

A well-laid plan

Jaimie Bleck

In 2011, Bleck, who had just joined Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science, and Michelitch, then a Ph.D. candidate at New York University (NYU), put together an ambitious research proposal—“Good Morning Timbuktu! The Impact of Radio in Rural Islamic Africa.”

The project garnered a Kellogg Institute research grant, significant outside funding, and honorable mention in the 2011 competition for the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics at Iowa State University.

The pair, who met in Ghana in 2009, planned a randomized controlled trial to explore whether access to information via radio would help citizens—especially women and low-status men—participate more independently in the democratic process. USAID donated solar radios, computers, and the i-Touches that a team of local research assistants would use for interviews.

In keeping with the project’s participatory approach, listening to local voices was key to fine-tuning the research plan.

“We went to the experts,” Bleck says, describing the October 2011 pilot study the two researchers devised. Bleck visited villages not included in the trial to get advice about how to encourage women to participate and how, in a patriarchal culture, to ensure they would be able to retain the radios they would receive as part of the experiment.

It made perfect sense to combine Bleck’s interest in innovative methods and deep knowledge of the region, where she has spent 11 years conducting research, with Michelitch’s focus on methodological expertise and African development.

Kristin Michelitch

“Kristin is one of the best out there in coming up with creative ways to measure behavior in the field,” says Bleck, who encouraged Michelitch to apply for a Kellogg visiting fellowship to enhance the collaboration.

They conducted an initial wave of research in 10 villages in January 2012. Half the villages were “treated,” meaning that women and low-status men received solar-powered radios that should give them direct access to political information. (The same groups in “control” villages received flashlights.)

Bleck and Michelitch planned to follow up after the April 2012 national election with two more rounds of surveys to determine the effect of the radio distribution on voting.

Villages under study become “contested territory”

But sometimes researchers’ best-laid plans are turned upside down by circumstances almost no one would have anticipated.

In March 2012 a military coup overturned Mali’s democratically elected government. In short order, the country’s northern provinces were taken over by Tuareg secessionists and then by Islamist rebels, including Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb.

The rural villages where Bleck and Michelitch were conducting their study were not directly involved in fighting but were “contested territory” on the border of rebel-held areas. No elections would take place.

However, the research would go on.

“We turned our attention to how access to radio has affected people’s political views in a time of incredible upheaval,” Michelitch says.

In summer 2012, the team conducted two more waves of research in the 10 villages, including a survey of more than 600 respondents, interviews with village leaders, same-gender focus groups, spousal interviews, and content analysis of radio programs.

With data from before and after the transition between regimes and the ongoing rebellion, they now aim to measure the effect of access to information on citizenship in the context of unprecedented political uncertainty.

“If anything, political information became even more important,” says Bleck. “While the world focused on Mali’s political crises, our research found that most rural Malians were more concerned with the humanitarian and infrastructure challenges they face every day in living through extreme drought and famine.”

As Bleck and Michelitch described in a post on the influential political science blog The Monkey Cage (January 2013), villagers weighed in on topics such as the importance of restoring democracy before retaking the north; whether it would be worth fighting a war to reunify the country; and what they felt was the country’s most important policy issue.

“When villagers were asked what they would prioritize if they were president of Mali two months before the coup, 51 percent of respondents cited human development issues like health, education, agriculture, and water as their priority as president, while 9 percent mentioned peace and security,” they wrote.

Following the coup and the insurgency, villagers prioritizing peace and security rose to 14 percent but those mentioning human development issues rose even more, to 67 percent.

The overwhelming majority of respondents who took advantage of the opportunity to record messages to President Obama requested humanitarian relief and basic infrastructure rather than aid in resolving either of the ongoing political crises.

“President Obama, here we are hungry. We want you to bring us food,” said one such message. “The rebels tire us a lot, our goats, our cattle can no longer be brought to graze in the North because they risk being stolen. Do your best to quickly help us.” (See all 531 messages here.)

Getting the word out—academic and policy dissemination

In March 2013, Bleck and Michelitch were back in Mali, discussing their preliminary results and possible next steps with their research team. The trial is part of a larger effort to understand democratization and development in Islamic Africa.

While still analyzing their data, the two can say with confidence that people given access to radios do acquire and share new information and substantive political opinions—both skills vital to active citizenship. Women are less likely to automatically adopt elite opinions—and men are less decisive in their opinions overall. In addition, radio seems to increase the importance of national over ethnic identity.

The collaborators have presented their preliminary results to the Kellogg Institute, the African Studies Association, and NYU Abu Dhabi, with more conference presentations set for coming months. They plan multiple journal articles on elements of the project.

“In addition to our academic work, we have been actively communicating with the policy community,” says Bleck, who presented their early findings at a State Department meeting in October. “Our Monkey Cage post was widely distributed to policymakers and cited by pundits.”

The post also led to a consultancy with the World Bank on mixed-method research in fragile states. Following France’s military intervention in Mali, Bleck was interviewed by Radio France International (RFI).

“Villagers would characterize the situation as the people in power creating a state of political gridlock,” she told RFI’s approximately 22 million listeners.

“If people in the capital are fighting among themselves, no one can move forward to meet the needs these people are identifying as critical… creating peace and security, but then trying to tackle things such as health, infrastructure, and roads.”

Both Bleck and Michelitch are gratified that they have been able to help amplify the voices of residents of rural Mali in a time of political and environmental crisis.

“The most exciting projects are those that successfully marry the worlds of academia and policy,” says Michelitch, who starts as assistant professor of political science at Vanderbilt University in the fall.

Bleck agrees. “We certainly hope that our findings can contribute to development in Mali,” she says.

Learn More >

Originally published at kellogg.nd.edu

Classics Professor David Hernández Awarded Three Fellowships

2013-04-16T12:00:00-04:00

David Hernández recently received a trio of prestigious research awards.

University of Notre Dame Assistant Professor David Hernández recently received a trio of research awards: a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and a fellowship from Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation.

“I am honored and thrilled to receive this tremendous help for my research,” says Hernández, who is a faculty member in both the Department of Classics and the Department of Anthropology. This research support, he says, will enable him to publish the findings from a spectacular archeological site in Butrint, Albania, that he has studied since 2004.

The site, recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, has yielded archeological treasures and architectural insights from successive settlements, most notably Greek and Roman, which date from the 7th century B.C. to the 7th century A.D.

Hernández and his team have uncovered the architectural footprints of a Roman forum—a monumental town square built 2,000 years ago—and a 38-columned stoa thought to have served as a Greek civic center. Among hundreds of artifacts discovered at Butrint are a life-sized Roman statue, ceramic figurines—one of a female reveler of Bacchus, the other of a Greek goddess—and a wooden plough from the 4th century B.C.

Buried Beneath our Feet

Forum pavement and the Roman Basilica discovered at Butrint, Albania.

“Archaeology is the science of human history,” Hernández says. “Buried beneath our feet throughout the entire world lie the physical traces of our ancestors—their lives, homes, cities, civilizations—the remnants of the struggles and achievements that gave birth to our modern world.”

The fellowship award from Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation is among the most prestigious in the field of Classical Archaeology.

All three grants underscore the importance and quality of Hernández’ work, according to Ken Garcia, associate director for the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

Garcia, who oversees grants awarded to faculty members in the College of Arts and Letters, notes that the competition for each of these fellowships is fierce. The ACLS, for example, received 1,121 fellowship applications nationwide and made only 65 awards—a success rate of only 5.8 percent.

Four of these ACLS awards went to Arts and Letters faculty, including Hernández. Also receiving ACLS fellowships for 2013-14 are:
• Katherine Brading, William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and director of Notre Dame’s History and Philosophy of Science graduate program, for “Theoretical Physics as a Contribution of Philosophy;”
• Catherine Cangany, assistant professor of history, for “An Empire of Fakes: Counterfeit Goods in Eighteenth-Century America;” and
• Xiaoshan Yang, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, for “Wang Anshi and the Song Poetic Sensibility.”

Discovery and Excavation

Notre Dame undergraduate Kaitlyn Farrell with a tile stamped in ancient Greek, one of the many finds from the Butrint excavation.

After he returns from the final excavation season in Butrint this summer, Hernández will use his fellowships to take an 18-month sabbatical during which he will focus full-time on a two-volume publication of the excavation findings, tentatively titled The Discovery and Excavation of the Roman Forum at Butrint: Urbanism in Ancient Epirus From the 7th Century B.C. to the 7th Century A.D.

The first volume, a monograph, will summarize and present the project’s major results and then contextualize them in terms of the Mediterranean and the Roman Empire. Hernández cites new evidence, for example, that Butrint was on par with Athens and Corfu, “in the use of marble for monumental architecture in the 6th century B.C.”

The book will also explore “the formation of the Butrint headland, the creation of the urban center there, and eventually its monumentalization during the Roman Empire and the breakdown of urbanism,” Hernández says.

In a second, edited volume, Hernández plans to examine the specialized analyses that have taken place at the site, including studies of its ancient glass, archaeobotany, archaeozoology, ceramics, sculpture, coins, and inscriptions.

Hernández has already made it a point to share his expertise with Arts and Letters student researchers during the summer excavation seasons in Butrint. By the end of the final trip this summer, he will have introduced more than two dozen undergraduate students (most from Notre Dame) and 16 graduate students to the site.

Student Engagement

Arts and Letters students Michael Kipp and Mattimore Cooper excavating burials at the Butrint World Heritage Site in Albania.

Not merely observers, the students actively engage in excavating and processing finds. “I consider the undergraduates as team members,” Hernández says.

Four Arts and Letters students returning to Albania this summer are Mattimore Cronin, Kaitlyn Farrell, Matthew Wieck and Suzanna Pratt. Wieck, a Classics major, is looking forward to his third season in the trenches, having now become one of the most experienced undergraduate students in archaeological field methods.

Matthew Wieck is one of four Arts and Letters students who will return to Butrint with David Hernández in summer 2013

Pratt, a Seattle-area native with majors in anthropology and peace studies, worked as a finds manager in 2011 at Butrint. Drawing on that experience, she produced a senior thesis examining how cultural heritage is managed in Albania. With so many stakeholders, Hernández says, “Butrint is a perfect place for this type of research, and Suzanna has done very well creating a fascinating study.”

In any discussion of his work at Butrint, Hernández is quick to credit the many other scholars and researchers involved as well as the funding entities that have made the project possible.

The Albanian Institute of Archaeology’s Dhimiter Condi is a co-director of the project. Funding has come from Notre Dame, the American Philosophical Society, and the Butrint Foundation. At the University, key supporters include the Office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Arts and Letters, and the Department of Classics. The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts also helped underwrite Hernández’ research—and covered all student expenses including transportation.

The Genesis of Europe

The opportunity to examine the Butrint site, layer by layer, has been a privilege for him and his students, Hernández says, adding that the work also has significance to fellow scholars and archaeologists because it has allowed them “to look, as if though a window, through all those centuries.”

“It’s a glimpse,” he says, “into the genesis of Europe.”

Learn More >

Exploring Capitalism and Catholicism in India and Dubai

2013-04-16T11:00:00-04:00

What is the role of religion in rapidly developing societies?

It is a hotly contested question among social scientists and theologians alike, with the prevailing view holding that global capitalism either makes religion irrelevant or produces a backlash of fundamentalism.

Brandon Vaidyanathan, a graduate student in Notre Dame’s Department of Sociology, is discovering a different reality as he focuses on the world of skilled professionals in multinational corporations in two rapidly globalizing cities—Bangalore, India, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

“We need to rethink the idea that it is only capitalism that affects religion—and to consider empirically how religion simultaneously shapes and is being shaped by global capitalism,” says Vaidyanathan, a research fellow in the University’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

A Mix of Cultures

What sparked Vaidyanathan’s dissertation was his longstanding desire to make better sense of some important similarities and contradictions in two regions where he spent much of his early life—India and the Arabian Gulf.

An Indian citizen, Vaidyanathan was raised in Oman, where his parents, an engineer and a physician, worked. With occasional trips to India, as well as a full year there as a teenager, and high school in Dubai, he grew up in a mix of cultures. He negotiated a third when he moved to Canada to earn a BBA and then an MSc in business administration.

“While in business school, I became increasingly fascinated with broader questions on the relationship between economics, culture, and religion,” Vaidyanathan says. “Earning a Ph.D. in sociology seemed the way to bring all these threads together.”

An Empirical Study in Two Cities

Vaidyanathan’s dissertation, “Secularization in the East?: Capitalism and Catholicism in Bangalore and Dubai,” focuses on skilled Catholic professionals working in multinational corporations in two very different but exponentially developing cities: Bangalore and Dubai.

In both cities, Catholicism is a minority religion but a significant one—and in both cities, Catholicism shows the strong influence of charismatic and evangelical practices. Looking at one religious institution in both places provides a good window to the religion-capitalism relationship.

For a study of this scope, Vaidyanathan’s fieldwork was critical—and his adviser, Christian Smith, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and director of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Research, calls it “ambitious and promising.”

Vaidyanathan observed his subjects over twelve months in both religious and secular settings and held more than 200 interviews—with professionals he categorizes as either “the devout,” or “the disengaged,” as well as with non-Catholic corporate professionals, pastors, Vatican officials, academics, counselors, and journalists.

While he found several differences between cities in the professionals’ religious and civic lives, Vaidyanathan also found that, for many, a deep attachment to religion helps tremendously in success at work and in dealing with the work world’s intense pressures.

“There are enormous pressures and challenges that come with new forms of capitalism in emerging markets,” he explains.

“They often take a severe toll on people’s lives—for instance, the inability to trust people in intensely competitive workplaces and the often painfully difficult challenge of balancing commitments to tradition, family, or community in the turbulent global economy.”

A Push and Pull Between Religion and Corporate Culture

For the Catholic professionals he studied, religious life was key to negotiating these pressures.

“Church groups cultivate various transferable skills and capacities, from training in Power Point and Excel to promoting such ‘soft skills’ as teamwork, punctuality, and etiquette,” Vaidyanathan says. “This spills over into members’ work lives and contributes to their professional success. Church networks also help members find employment and mentors.”

Additionally, he found, many professionals see their churches as a refuge—one with meaningful relationships, a sense of community and belonging, and alternative goals that transcend societal ideals to pursue wealth, power, status, and pleasure.

Yet, because the religious life of the professionals pushes back in many ways on their day-to-day corporate culture and the consumerism it often extols, religion’s support of the corporate world is “muted.”

“The church groups that these professionals attend, which are predominantly shaped by the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, also prescribe alternative ideals based on powerful emotional experiences of God and strict moral prescriptions for ‘discipleship,’” he says.

“These lead some professionals to isolate themselves socially from their coworkers in order to safeguard themselves, which then reinforces their need for religious refuge. Others even pass up promotions or job transfers to maintain commitments to their church communities.”

Implications for Larger Questions

While Vaidyanathan’s dissertation focuses on two cities, it has important implications for the ongoing debate on the relationship between religion and development.

“Some scholars think it is self-evident that development, wealth, and success will weaken religion,” says Smith.

“While that may be true under certain conditions, Brandon is able to show that in certain contexts it does precisely the opposite. The empirical reality on the ground is so much more complex than the dominant one-directional theories have been able to explain.”

In fall 2013, Vaidyanathan will begin a postdoctoral position at Rice University, where he will continue to delve into questions of religion and culture around the world. Working with sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund, he will embark on a global study of how scientists in eight nations understand religion and ethics.

Learn More >

Originally published at kellogg.nd.edu