Department of History // Department of History

Historian Brad Gregory's New Book Explores "The Unintended Reformation"

2012-02-20T14:00:00-05:00

How did our world come to be as it is? Examining why and how the West was propelled into its current pluralism and polarization over the long term, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard University Press, 2012), offers new insight into how life in North America and Europe has been shaped over the past five centuries by the Protestant Reformation.

Author Brad Gregory, University of Notre Dame historian, traces the relationships among religion, science, politics, morality, capitalism and consumerism, and higher education from the Middle Ages through the Reformation era to the present.

“Because 16th- and 17th-century Christians could not agree about what was true, right and good, modern individuals were eventually permitted to determine these things for themselves,” Gregory says.

“And as long as most people still continued to agree about basic moral views and political assumptions, despite their religious differences, such politically protected individual freedoms could contribute positively to the robust functioning of a democratic society.”

However, Gregory argues in the book, fundamental disagreements about how we should live and the lack of a shared view of the common good—which is due, in part, to the proliferation of divergent secular and religious views—today tends to cause friction and faction when those freedoms are exercised.

“Basic modern institutions and arrangements solved the problems of religious coexistence inherited from early modern Europe, but they also have created the conditions for the proliferation of intractable societal disagreements that increasingly seem to frustrate the healthy functioning of a democratic political process,” Gregory says.

Prior to the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation sought to advance this vision, but unresolved doctrinal disagreements and religiopolitical conflicts prompted changes in the religious fabric that bound societies together. Virtually all domains of human life were affected.

“One of the book’s arguments is that disciplinary specialization and the fragmentation of knowledge prevent us from seeing important connections among phenomena ordinarily studied separately,” Gregory says.

“The tendency of many historians to concentrate on different types of history—intellectual, social, economic and political—to the exclusion of others diminishes our comprehension of the past. All these types of history must be incorporated because of their combined explanatory power, a corollary of their interrelated historical influence. I have sought to show this in my book.”

Learn More>

Originally published at newsinfo.nd.edu.

The Medieval Institute: A Community of Medievalists

2012-01-16T13:00:00-05:00

The Medieval Institute, located on the seventh floor of the Hesburgh Library, is a scholarly and academic unit of the University that promotes research and teaching on the cultures, languages, and religions of the medieval period (from roughly the fifth through 15th centuries).

The institute offers a home to more than 60 medievalists from across the faculty, says Olivia Remie Constable, the Robert M. Conway Director of the institute.

“We combine teaching, research and community,” she says. “We’re very broad-minded. It’s wonderful to have such a large community of medievalists at Notre Dame.”

Medieval Institute faculty come from The Law School and more than a dozen different departments in the College of Arts and Letters, including anthropology; art, art history, and design; classics; English; German and Russian languages and literatures; history; Irish language and literature; music; philosophy; political science; Program of Liberal Studies; Romance languages and literatures; and theology, as well as the History and Philosophy of Science Program.

The institute’s seventh-floor space includes a reading room and library that houses more than 100,000 volumes, including primary and secondary source materials, reference materials, and scholarly journals. A paleography room houses manuscript catalogs. In addition, nearly the complete holdings of the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, Italy, are available on microfilm. The space also includes a seminar room for classes, and carrels for graduate students. There are also are some offices for faculty and visiting scholars on the sixth floor.

An academic and teaching unit, the Medieval Institute offers undergraduate majors and minors, as well as a graduate Ph.D. in Medieval Studies. Typically there are 40 to 50 undergraduate majors, who also may participate in a study-abroad program based in St. Andrews, Scotland. Four to five graduate students are admitted annually to study for careers in academia, museums, or libraries.

The institute is currently expanding the area of Byzantine studies—an integral part of medieval studies, focusing on the Eastern Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, notes Roberta Baranowski, associate institute director. Expansion of Byzantine studies will include the addition of a new faculty position in Byzantine history and a faculty chair in Byzantine theology. A new Byzantine reading room, which will include an area devoted to Arabic and Near Eastern studies, will have its grand opening in late February.

With the goal of creating a vibrant community of medievalists, the Institute also sponsors lectures, conferences, colloquia, workshops, and seminars. The Institute in 2015 will host the prestigious Medieval Academy of America annual meeting.

Learn More >

Originally published by Carol Bradley at al.nd.edu on January 12, 2012.

College Welcomes Two New Moreau Fellows

2012-01-03T15:00:00-05:00

Hip-hop and boxing are not just entertainment for Notre Dame’s two new Moreau Academic Diversity Postdoctoral Fellows, Brian Su-Jen Chung and Jesse Costantino; they’re fertile ground for academic research.

Chung, in the American studies department, and Costantino, in English, joined the College of Arts and Letters in fall 2011 as part of a University effort to enhance cultural awareness and diversity within the campus community.

The program, supported by the offices of the president, provost, and college deans, was initiated last year with 11 new postdoctoral fellows representing a large cross-section of academic disciplines. During one-to two-year residencies, Moreau Fellows engage in research, teach classes, and mentor students.

“We’re operating in an increasingly global and diverse environment, and it’s important that we prepare our students for that experience,” explains Susan Ohmer, who has worked collaboratively with vice president and associate provost Don Pope–Davis on the University’s Diversity Advisory Committee. Concerning the Moreau Fellow applicants, Ohmer says, “We found that we have a very rich candidate pool, especially in departments where the disciplines focus on gender, race, and ethnicity.”

Chung, who received his Ph.D. in American culture at the University of Michigan, taught a course this fall titled Hip-hop is Dead! Race, Circulation, and the Global Block, which examines the subculture dance and music phenomenon hip-hop within the context of global politics, economics, and history.

“Like other forms of popular culture, hip-hop, specifically rap music, is a billion-dollar industry, and it’s used to sell all kinds of products,” says Chung. “It’s a mass- mediated expressive culture that shapes our social consciousness of race, gender, class, and sexuality… Students are drawn to the artistry of hip-hop culture and are eager to learn more about its history.”

Chung’s spring semester class, “Screening Asian Americans,” focuses on Asian American histories and experiences as seen through the lens of U.S. mass media.

Costantino’s interest in the intersections between class, race, and aesthetics in American culture led him to study boxing, the subject of his dissertation research, which he completed at the University of California, Berkeley. A specialist in 20th-century American literature and visual culture, Costantino this fall taught a course in Notre Dame’s Department of English called Violent Modernisms, which highlights social and political change in the works of selected American writers.

“What has been most gratifying about this course,” says Costantino, “is how readily the issues in these texts translate into present situations. For example, we recently spent a week discussing the Occupy (Wall Street) protests and the corresponding discourses of violence and ideology in media coverage of the events. Students show tremendous interest in how slippery a concept like violence can be.”

Chung and Costantino are the latest to join what has become a community of Moreau Fellows on Notre Dame’s campus.

Jessica Graham, a 2010 Moreau Fellow in Notre Dame’s Department of History, describes that community as a supportive blend of formal and informal ingredients: “Formally, Maura Ryan and the other associate deans have scheduled a series of lunch workshops to help in our professional development and career advancement. Informally, we support one another in various ways. We call each other for help on the minor questions (“How do I file an expense report?”) to the more urgent issues about career and life in general…It’s a great group; there exists a true sense that folks are willing to lend an ear, advice, or help in any way they can.”

Learn More >

Originally published by Karla Cruise at al.nd.edu on December 19, 2011.

Rousseau Exhibit to Focus on Dignity of the Human Person

2011-12-12T13:00:00-05:00

Julia Douthwaite, professor of French in Notre Dame’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, is organizing a series of events to honor Swiss philosopher and writer Jean–Jacques Rousseau’s 300th birthday and stimulate a cross–disciplinary discussion on social justice and human dignity.

The project, called Rousseau 2012: On the Road to DIGNITY, will be part of the curriculum for more than a dozen courses throughout the College of Arts and Letters and the Law School and will feature both guest lectures and an Amnesty International photography exhibit on poverty and human rights that includes portraits from Mexico, Egypt, Nigeria, India, and Macedonia.

Douthwaite says she and a student chanced upon the exhibit, called DIGNITÉ, on its opening day during a research trip to Paris in 2010. “We were captivated by the images, the stories on the walls,” she says.

Knowing that others at Notre Dame would find the collection just as moving, Douthwaite approached the curator and the photographers who were at the opening and convinced them to make the Snite Museum of Art the exhibit’s first stop in the United States.

Cross–Disciplinary Discourse

“Since finishing my recent book project on revolutionary France,” she says, “I’ve been thinking a lot about human rights: the origin of the concept, its progress, and obstacles. And so gradually, I realized that I had a concept: Rousseau, pioneer of humanitarian thought, would marry DIGNITÉ and the 2012 tricentennial.”

Visiting lecturers for the series include Professor Christie McDonald from Harvard University, who will focus on Rousseau and gender studies; Professor Christopher Kelly from Boston College, who will discuss political theory of On the Social Contract; Professor Jason Neidleman from University of LaVerne, who will lecture on Rousseau and religious liberty; and Professor Serge Margel from L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, who will talk about Rousseau and moral philosophy. Two of the DIGNITÉ photographers have also been invited to speak about photojournalism and global political activism: Johann Rousselot (India) and Philippe Brault (Egypt).

According to Douthwaite, faculty throughout the University are planning to incorporate the exhibit into classes they will teach in spring 2012. Those participating are from the College of Arts and Letters’ Program of Liberal Studies, Ph.D. in Literature Program, and departments of American studies, Romance languages and literatures, English, political science, and history, as well as faculty from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Law School’s Center for Civil and Human Rights.

“The demonstrable commitment to social justice and poverty studies at Notre Dame make this kind of work take flight here,” she says.

Student Engagement

During summer 2011, Douthwaite worked with two French students, Lea Malewitz and Lauren Wester, to prepare the exhibit with colleagues in the Snite Museum and translate into English the original French exhibit catalogue, Dignité: Droits humains et pauvreté.

Douthwaite and the students also selected excerpts from Rousseau’s texts and paired them with images from the exhibit to create study guides for students and the faculty who plan to incorporate discussions of the project into their curricula.

“The study guides do not aim to canonize Rousseau,” Douthwaite says. “On the contrary, we aim to put Rousseau’s work and thought into a dialectical kind of questioning with recent thinkers in political science, gender studies, and religious history.”

Douthwaite says including students in her work through projects such as this is a priority for her as both a scholar and a teacher. “The collaboration we have undertaken this summer has been energizing and, I think, has opened the students’ eyes to some new avenues for professional development where they will be able to use their expertise in the future.”

Shades of Meaning

Malewitz, a senior double majoring in French and Arabic studies, says her work on the project was an invaluable educational experience that helped her fine-tune her language skills.

“This was the first time I had ever done any translating,” she says. “Usually in language classes, we focus on producing our own language. I found this project enhanced my vocabulary both in words I had never seen before and in thinking about the shades of meaning of words I already know. The challenge of conveying exactly what the author meant was really enriching.”

The students have also been able to get involved in other aspects of the exhibit, from choosing the artwork and texts that will be displayed to designing the layout of the room, says Wester ‘11, who completed her undergraduate degree in French and psychology and is now working toward a master’s in French at Notre Dame.

Wester says she was particularly eager to get involved with the project because it built on her previous humanitarian work as a volunteer document translator for francophone refugees at Freedom House in Detroit.

“First of all, I hope that visitors learn to appreciate their own living conditions after viewing the miserable situations that the people in DIGNITÉ are subjected to,” Wester says. “Secondly, I’d like people to recognize that these terrible conditions still exist throughout the world. Making the Notre Dame and South Bend community aware of these injustices is one of the most important things this exhibit can do.”

Making an Impact

In addition to conveying a powerful message about human rights and Rousseau’s work, the project demonstrates how relevant French studies are in today’s world, Douthwaite says.

“With our linguistic expertise, the students and I have provided valuable assistance to Amnesty International in France,” she says. “With our historical and literary abilities, we also have been able to conceptualize linkages between past and present—between Rousseau’s prescience in The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and today’s urgent call for a more just economy.”

DIGNITY will be on display in the Snite Museum of Art from January 15, 2012, until March 11, 2012. The exhibit—along with the translated document Douthwaite, Wester, and Malewitz created—will then move on to Chicago.

“As the DIGNITY exhibit launches its American tour,” Douthwaite says, “it is gratifying to know that our catalogue, and the memory of the leadership role of Notre Dame students and faculty, will go along with it.”

Learn More >

Originally published by Joanna Basile at al.nd.edu on December 01, 2011.

Notre Dame Among Top Producers of Fulbrights

2011-12-05T15:00:00-05:00

University of Notre Dame students were awarded 13 Fulbright grants for the 2011-12 academic year, placing the University among the top universities in the nation. Eleven of the 13 are from the College of Arts and Letters.

The U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program, Fulbright recently announced the complete list of colleges and universities that produced the most 2011-2012 U.S. Fulbright students. The success of the top-producing institutions was highlighted in the Oct. 24 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Our students are well-equipped to shape their professions and disciplines internationally,” says Deb Rotman, director of Notre Dame’s Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement (CUSE), the office that administers the Fulbright competition. “Our Fulbright scholars illustrate one of the many ways in which the University is cultivating global citizens and world leaders who will successfully address the significant challenges of the 21st century.”

The Class of 2011 undergraduates who received Fulbrights include:

Jaime Cordes—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Russia (anthropology/Russian)
John Greil—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Germany (German/Program of Liberal Studies)
Amanda Johnson—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Poland (American studies)
Cherrica Li—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Taiwan (political science/economics)
Andre Mrugala—Fulbright research and study grant to Poland (mechanical engineering)
Claire Reising—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Belgium (French/English)
Virginia Varraveto—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Peru (English/Spanish)
Ann Weber—Fulbright research and study grant to Austria (history/theology)

Five Notre Dame graduate students also received Fulbrights in 2011:

Max Deardorff—Fulbright Scholar to Russia (history Ph.D. candidate)
Nathan Gerth—Fulbright Scholar to Spain (history Ph.D. candidate)
John Moscatiello—Fulbright Scholar to Spain (history Ph.D. candidate)
Beth Palkovic—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Indonesia (2011 master’s graduate from ACE Program)
Laura Wilczek—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to South Korea (2011 master’s graduate from ACE Program, ‘09 B.A. in English)

Almost 1,700 American students, artists and young professionals in more than 100 different fields of study received Fulbright Program grants to study, teach English, and conduct research in over 140 countries throughout the world beginning in fall 2011. Students receiving awards for this academic year applied through 600 colleges or universities. Lists of Fulbright recipients are available here.

Since its inception in 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided more than 310,000 participants—chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential—with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns. In the past 65 years, more than 44,000 students from the United States have benefited from the Fulbright experience.

Learn More >

Part of this story was originally published by Susan Guibert at newsinfo.nd.edu on October 28, 2011.

History Alumna Inspires New Generation of College Students

2011-11-07T15:00:00-05:00

Notre Dame Department of History alumna Nicole Farmer Hurd ’92 was recently featured on NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams for her efforts to help disadvantaged high school students enter the world of higher education.

Hurd is the founder and executive director of the National College Advising Corps (NCAC), a program that strives to increase the number and graduation rate of low-income, underrepresented, and first-generation college students. NCAC is housed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Hurd also serves as a clinical assistant professor in the School of Education.

“In the Advising Corps, we talk about our core values as grace and humility,” she says. “There are no easy answers in education; there are no silver bullets. The NBC segment was a wonderful moment of gratitude in the Advising Corps story—it was a moment to say that we do not have all the answers, but if we work together, we can make a difference.”

Providing Opportunities

In 2011–12, 321 NCAC-trained college counselors will reach more than 110,000 students at 368 underserved high schools across the country.

“It is incredibly rewarding to visit a high school, hear from a parent, work with a counselor, or hug a student who just found out he or she will be the first one in the family to go to college. It is an awesome process to witness,” she says.

“It is also rewarding to see our recent college graduates finish their service as advisers and go off to graduate school, work for transforming nonprofits, or commit their careers to education,” Hurd adds. “They are the next generation of leaders in this sector, and I find their commitment and passion inspiring.”

In many ways, she says, NCAC is modeled after the program she founded while serving as an assistant dean and director of the Center for Undergraduate Excellence at the University of Virginia. That initiative, called the College Guide Program, earned her the 2007 Virginia Governor’s Award for Volunteerism and Community Service and is part of NCAC.

Hurd has also received other recognition for her work. In addition to the NBC “Making a Difference” segment, she was recently named one of 44 American Marshall Memorial Fellows for 2011. The fellows are part of a program that educates emerging American and European leaders on the importance of the transatlantic relationship and encourages them to collaborate on a range of international and domestic policy challenges.

Educational Impact

Hurd says it was her own experiences as an undergraduate in the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame that helped nurture her commitment to social justice and the idea that every child deserves access to an education that will prepare them for the future.

It also allowed her to develop the skills she relies on every day to help fulfill that mission.

“As a history major, I had to write, ask questions, research, make convincing arguments, engage in scholarly debate, and appreciate others’ narratives and stories,” she says. “My College of Arts and Letters education taught me communication skills that have been invaluable to my career. From fundraising to developing new programs, training advisers, or working with our team, communication is critical.”

Hurd, who says she “fell in love with history” during her time at Notre Dame, went on to receive her master’s from Georgetown University and a doctoral degree from the University of Virginia.

“Whether it was earning a Ph.D. in American religious history and teaching or working in the education/nonprofit sector,” she says, “the constant curiosity and love of learning has stayed with me.”

Learn More >

Department of History
National College Advising Corps
Nicole Hurd bio page
Hurd NBC interview video
NBC Making a Difference video
College Guide Program, now the Virginia College Advising Corps
Read Helping Students Navigate the Path to College online
American Marshall Memorial Fellowship

Originally published by Joanna Basile at al.nd.edu on November 03, 2011.

Historian John Deak Awarded Fellowship to Austria

2011-11-02T16:00:00-04:00

University of Notre Dame Assistant History Professor John Deak jokes that working in the largely neglected field of administrative and constitutional history he’s “the nerdy guy who stands in the corner at cocktail parties.”

But his scholarship has recently earned serious attention in the form of a Richard Plaschka Fellowship from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research. The fellowship will allow him to spend most of the next year in Vienna, working on his first book, Power and the Politics of State in Imperial Austria, 1848-1918.

“Really, when we think about these things,” he says, “law and administrative norms are how complicated regimes function—and constitutionally there wasn’t a more complicated state in 19th-century Europe than the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy.”

New Perspective

In his research, Deak focuses on how the Austrian imperial bureaucracy adapted itself and the Habsburg state to participatory politics.

“Historians since 1918 have seen this monarchy as a backward empire, which was destined for collapse because it held back its various national groups from their natural development into sovereign states,” he says.

But instead, Deak argues, “we should understand the ways in which the Habsburg state actively developed a vibrant political culture through representative and democratic institutions.

“By understanding the Habsburg Monarchy’s political institutions and political culture, historians, political scientists, and other scholars of Eastern and Central Europe can have a fuller knowledge of the origins and limitations of democracy on the European continent,” he says, adding that was under the aegis of Imperial Austria that Central Europe developed its institutions and definitions of citizenship, the rule of law, and democratic participation.

Welcome Validation

Receiving the Plaschka Fellowship, Deak says, “means that Austrian historians, who ultimately judged the merits of my project, have validated my project and my research. This is immensely satisfying.”

The award is named in honor of Austrian scholar Plaschka, a professor of Eastern European history at the University of Vienna from 1967 to 1993 and a former head of the Austrian East and Southeast Europe Institute who died in 2001.

Deak takes a leave from Notre Dame starting in January 2012 to spend at least nine months living and working in Austria. “It makes research easy,” he says, “since many of the documents of the far-flung empire ended up in Vienna.”

This will be the sixth visit to Austria for Deak, who comes to his academic interests in part because of his personal roots in the area.

Family Ties

“Most of my great-grandparents migrated to the United States around 1900 from various parts of the Habsburg Monarchy,” he says. “They spoke a bevy of languages but identified themselves as ‘Austrians,’ which now has a much smaller and less inclusive definition than it did for them.

“My family gave me a certain curiosity and ambivalence toward questions of national identity. So, even as a child, I was interested in the ‘old country,’ the old Austrian Empire. Much to my delight, it was complicated enough to sustain a lifetime of scholarship, to travel, and to learn new languages—and there were 11 different official languages.”

His continued experiences in Vienna, he says, “make me a better mentor to our graduate students and undergraduates who are just getting started on their own foreign research.”

At Notre Dame this semester, Deak is teaching a lecture course, German History from 1740-1870, as well as an undergraduate seminar called What is History?

Learn More >

Originally published by Mike Danahey at al.nd.edu on October 28, 2011.

Historian Thomas Noble Advocates Teacher-Scholar Model

2011-10-25T09:00:00-04:00

In 2011, University of Notre Dame Professor Thomas F.X. Noble received the prestigious Otto Gründler Book Prize in medieval studies, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and the Sheedy Award—the highest teaching honor in the College of Arts and Letters.

Noble, who spent all of his 11 years at Notre Dame as either director of the Medieval Institute or chair of the Department of History, says this rare confluence of honors means so much to him precisely because it is an opportunity to demonstrate that high quality teaching, scholarship, and university service need not be mutually exclusive.

“I had quite an unusual year,” he says, “but it’s been a good year for the entire Department of History, and I think that’s exactly what we want to see around here.

“If you look across the department, you’ll see many people who have won teaching awards and scholarly recognition, which I think simply makes the case that it doesn’t have to be one thing or the other.”

Teaching and Learning

As a teacher, Noble says he seeks first to learn about his students—who they are, where they are coming from, and why they are taking that particular course.

“People ask me what I teach,” Noble says. “I always say it’s not a what it’s a who. I teach students. History is the language I speak in my classroom but I’m teaching students. And I’m not teaching some theoretical classroom of students, I’m teaching these kids right here, right now.”

Having taught more than 7,000 undergraduates and trained 14 Ph.D. recipients in his 36-year career, Noble says this approach is just as important when shepherding the next generation of academics out to the frontiers of one’s field as it is in broad, introductory courses such as Western Civilization to 1500 and World of the Middle Ages.

Genuine enthusiasm is also a key to Noble’s teaching.

“I’m sort of infinitely curious about everything within the humanities,” Noble says. “I love learning all kinds of things and looking for connections among things, and as soon as I learn something, I’m just busting out with energy to go tell somebody—students, for instance.”

Sharing Discoveries

As a scholar, Noble specializes in the early medieval era, late antiquity, the papacy, and the city of Rome. He won the 2011 Gründler prize for Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, which explores controversies over religious art. His current NEH-funded project, Rome in the Medieval Imagination, will analyze how writers from Constantine to Petrarch talked about the legendary city.

While teaching is a way for any professor to share his or her passion and expertise in a particular subject, Noble says, it is not simply a one-way street.

“In the classroom, you have a group of students who are bright, interested people, but they are not your fellow specialists or professional colleagues,” he says. “You have to make clear to them whatever it is you’re trying to communicate. You’ve got to make it make sense, and that challenge has helped me enormously in my writing over the years.”

In that way, Noble says, his students have taught him how to make his research more accessible to an audience beyond the world of academia.

“When I write, I’d like for pretty much anybody to be able to read it and see what I meant,” he says, “so that’s another way that, in my view, teaching and scholarship actually support each other.”

Contributing Knowledge

Noble is also known for his commitment to service—to the Department of History, the College of Arts and Letters, the University, and outside professional associations such as the American Catholic Historical Association, which elected him to serve as its president for 2012.

These activities, he says, can both benefit from and support a faculty member’s work as a teacher and scholar. “We always talk about teaching and research, but in a sense there’s a kind of third leg of the stool and that is service,” he says.

In announcing the 2011 Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies Jo Ann DellaNeva noted that Noble is “deeply committed to the intellectual life of the College and the concept of teaching beyond the classroom.”

“His recent administrative duties have given him the opportunity to have a lasting impact on the way history—and, in particular, medieval history—is taught at Notre Dame,” she says.

Noble also shares his knowledge and teaching talent with Notre Dame alumni clubs across the country through Hesburgh Lecture Series and Universal Notre Dame Celebrations talks. “The connection people have to Notre Dame is just unbelievable, and I really thrive on that,” he says. “But also, these are people who are incredibly generous to the University and it is a chance to say, ‘Thank you—we can’t do what we do without you, and you need to hear that.’”

In the end, his service, teaching, and scholarly work all stem from the same desire to learn and share knowledge, Noble says. “There’s a wonderful line attributed to the Roman philosopher Seneca, which is, ‘I take no delight in knowing anything if I alone am to know it.’”

Learn More >

Originally published by Kate Cohorst at al.nd.edu on September 15, 2011.

Three History Ph.D. Students Awarded Fulbrights

2011-10-25T09:00:00-04:00

Three doctoral students in Notre Dame’s Department of History have been named 2011 Fulbright Scholars. Max Deardorff, Nathan Gerth, and John Moscatiello will use their Fulbright funding in Russia and Spain to support research that spans education policy, government bureaucracy, and religion.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Fulbright Program was established in 1946 to increase cross-cultural understanding and facilitate educational and research opportunities for students, scholars, and professionals in the United States and more than 155 countries around the world.

Universal Education Program

A scholar of colonial Latin American and global history, Deardorff is writing his dissertation on the ways in which the church and state cooperated to create a universal educational program in 16th century Spain and its colonies.

“For the first time, the kings of Spain sought to implement a program that applied to every person who lived within the borders of their realms—an important transition in the relationships between individuals and the states of which they formed part,” he says. “This new, idealized citizenship was predicated upon the demonstration of Christian belief and the appropriation of Spanish cultural customs.”

In Spain, Deardorff will examine manuscripts at the National Library in Madrid and bureaucratic documents in the Archive of the Indies in Seville in an attempt to discover “whether the real, daily process of acculturation ever looked anything like the ideals mapped out in formal meetings.”

The Fulbright award, he says, “has greatly facilitated my work, since I will be able to concentrate on my archival research long enough to dig deep into the sources.”

Bureaucrats and State Power

Gerth will use his Fulbright grant to spend 10 months in Tver, Russia, a city northwest of Moscow. There, he will dig through archival documents—everything from criminal investigation reports to hospital and school records—to study the lives and work of provincial bureaucrats.

His dissertation explores how local bureaucracies laid the groundwork for a powerful modern state in Russia. “Examining their world,” Gerth says, “will help us further understand what changes in provincial society helped spark the major social upheavals that Russia experienced during the latter decades of the 19th century.”

The Fulbright program has proven to be an “invaluable” resource in a country where personal and institutional relationships are key, he adds.

“Russian archives are not a straightforward place to conduct research,” he says. “The Fulbright office in Moscow has already helped me overcome some of these difficulties by putting me in touch with the state university in Tver, along with several historians in the city.”

Medieval Spanish Life

Moscatiello focuses his doctoral work on medieval Iberia, social history, the history of Christianity, the history of the family, and domesticity. Last year, he chaired an international graduate student conference at Notre Dame called “From Iberian Kingdoms to Atlantic Empires: Spain, Portugal, and the New World, 1250–1700.”

“Our conference caught the attention of the editors of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, who agreed to publish a special issue of the conference proceedings in 2012,” Moscatiello says, adding that one of the editors, Julio Escalona Monge, then offered to sponsor his application for a Fulbright to Spain.

In Madrid, Moscatiello will collaborate with scholars at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spanish National Research Council) to do archival investigations for his dissertation on the history of private life and domesticity in medieval Spain—specifically the everyday interactions between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. He will also be acting as a research specialist for the Council.

“As a cultural ambassador in the Fulbright program,” he says, “I hope that my work and community service help foster relations between American and Spanish scholars.”

Learn More >

Originally published by Joanna Basile at al.nd.edu on September 30, 2011.

History Major Provides Real-World Edge

2011-09-13T14:00:00-04:00

As a student in Notre Dame’s Department of History, Colin Rich ’11 didn’t memorize the names and dates of significant World War I battles, and he can’t recite a list of every U.S. president and vice president.

What he did learn as a history and economics major in the College of Arts and Letters was far more valuable: the ability to uncover how and why things happen, to speak persuasively, to write concisely, and to synthesize an array of sources into a cogent argument.

“I was drawn to the history major because of an interest in the analysis of change—the causes that lead to major historical events and their effects—not so much specific facts or figures,” says Rich, a native of Grand Rapids, Mich., who now works as an associate consultant at CAST Management Consultants in Los Angeles.

Firm Foundation

In exploring post-graduation opportunities, Rich says he found that many companies seemed to value a strong liberal arts background because they want to hire problem-solvers who can bring different perspectives.

And those are just the kinds of skills history majors learn to develop, notes Daniel Graff, the department’s director of undergraduate studies. “Historical study provides a firm foundation in the critical thinking and communicating skills necessary to navigate our complex contemporary world,” he says.

“Our majors emerge highly prepared to succeed in the widest variety of professions, whether medicine or management, teaching or policymaking, consulting or law, or the further study of history.”

As an example of these divergent career paths, Graff points to Michelle Gaseor ’11 and Stephanie Mulhern ’11, co-winners of the department’s best senior thesis award last spring.

According to the prize committee, both students’ projects “showcase serious primary research using foreign-language sources mined in archives abroad; they exhibit smart and synthetic analysis of primary documents to tell new and original stories about events and people familiar to specialists in the field; and they display a mature confidence in articulating arguments that reveal a true engagement with the scholarship they critique and build on at the same time.”

Divergent Paths

Mulhern, a fluent Spanish speaker who wrote her thesis on idolatry and gender in late colonial Lima, Peru, took her knowledge and skills to the corporate sector as a foreign intelligence consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton in Baltimore.

“I’ve always been interested in international development and government relations,” says Mulhern, who started her new job in August. “I’m working in a research position with an international focus, which will allow me to continue using the skills I developed as a history major while working with different government organizations and learning from experts in these fields.”

Gaseor, for her part, is headed to University of Wisconsin in Madison to begin a doctoral program in modern European and East Asian history, financed by a George Mosse Fellowship.

“The department works hard to encourage and support undergraduate research, and that research really helped me decide that I wanted to get my Ph.D. in history,” she says. “Studying abroad and writing a senior thesis helped me get directly into grad school and into a doctoral program with funding.”

Gaseor focused her thesis on the public image of Lucie Dreyfus, the wife of the late 19th-century French Army captain at the center of the “Dreyfus Affair.” She began her research while studying for a year in Paris and then continued the summer she returned, thanks to an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program grant from the College’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

Intellectual Exploration

At the start of her undergraduate career, Gaseor says she felt pulled in many different academic directions before realizing that a history major allowed her to explore all of them.

“I am a creative person,” she says. “I enjoy writing. I love reading about history and different cultures. I enjoy linguistics and studying languages, particularly French and Japanese. History combines all of my strengths and interests in a way that other subjects did not.”

As a young alumnus now in the business world, Rich encourages current Notre Dame students to pursue “anything and everything that might be of interest” and thus build for themselves a well-rounded undergraduate education.

“Business, engineering, and architecture all prepare students for specific fields that require a specific skill set,” he says. “I appreciate my two College of Arts and Letters majors because they taught a broader spectrum of skills applicable to multiple career paths.

“The history major is a major in intellectual resourcefulness,” he adds, “and it fosters communication and analytical competencies that give you an edge in the real world.”

Learn More >

Historian Thomas Noble Advocates Teacher-Scholar Model

2011-09-13T14:00:00-04:00

“I had quite an unusual year,” he says, “but it’s been a good year for the entire Department of History, and I think that’s exactly what we want to see around here.

Teaching and Learning

As a teacher, Noble says he seeks first to learn about his students—who they are, where they are coming from, and why they are taking that particular course.

Genuine enthusiasm is also a key to Noble’s teaching.

Sharing Discoveries

While teaching is a way for any professor to share his or her passion and expertise in a particular subject, Noble says, it is not simply a one-way street.

In that way, Noble says, his students have taught him how to make his research more accessible to an audience beyond the world of academia.

Contributing Knowledge

“His recent administrative duties have given him the opportunity to have a lasting impact on the way history—and, in particular, medieval history—is taught at Notre Dame,” she says.

Learn More >

New History Faculty Share Colonial Interests

2011-09-12T14:00:00-04:00

The Department of History’s two newest faculty members share a common interest in colonialism, although their research has led them to explore this issue in different parts of the globe.

Rebecca Tinio McKenna, whose research has focused on the Philippines, and Paul Ocobock, a scholar of Africa, both join the University of Notre Dame as assistant professors this fall.

“Our increasing ability to understand the developing world is something that’s very important and interesting to us,” says Thomas F.X. Noble, professor and former chair of the department.

Tinio McKenna and Ocobock are the latest in a series of hires that has added eight junior faculty members to the department over the last three years, he notes.

“We’re recapturing some strengths that we’ve had as a department—and finding people who can occupy a niche and expand our knowledge in other areas.”

Paul Ocobock

Ocobock is one of four Africa scholars the College of Arts and Letters hired this year in the departments of history, sociology, and political science.

As a graduate student at Oxford University and Princeton University, Ocobock’s research focused on disenfranchised Kenyan young men during the early 20th century colonial era. His 2010 dissertation was titled “Coming of Age in a Colony: Youthhood, Lawlessness, and Colonial Authority in Kenya, 1898-1963.”

“Africa is the poorest place on the planet,” he says. “It has struggled because it has been part of a global structure that has marginalized and exploited it. But despite this, Africa is a place of dynamism, creativity, and innovation.”

In his current work, Ocobock continues to examine the roles that youth experience and generational authority play in that country. With a median age of just 19, Kenya—and much of Africa—is spring-loaded for change, Ocobock says. “Young people are innovative and powerful engines of history,” he says.

As a visiting fellow at the University’s Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies last year, Ocobock mentored Notre Dame students preparing for research and service trips to Africa and says he looks forward to continuing that work as a faculty member.

His courses this fall include an undergraduate survey of African history to 1800 and a University seminar for first-year students that deconstructs the Mau Mau Rebellion, a precursor to Kenya’s independence in 1963.

“We’ll look at the rebellion from different historical angles, including class, gendered, and generational perspectives.”

Rebecca Tinio McKenna

Tinio McKenna’s doctoral dissertation at Yale University detailed a history of colonial nation-building and market-making in Baguio, a Philippine “hill station” enclave that Progressive-era urban planner Daniel Burnham designed for U.S. administrators, military officers, and their families.

She says she often uses specific locations, such as Baguio, as touchstones for historical learning because “places tell stories.”

“Places are great starting points where both material facts and cultural issues can speak,” she says. “As primarily a cultural historian, I sometimes wonder, ‘How do you conjure through words something as three-dimensional as a place?’”

Tinio McKenna, whose research and teaching interests include United States culture and political economy, completed her Ph.D. in 2010 and was a visiting assistant professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University last year.

In coming to Notre Dame, she says the University’s mission “resonates with my own commitment and sensibility.”

This fall, Tinio McKenna is teaching a course on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the United States, and a University seminar that will examine the United States and its place in the world.

“We’ll look at the extent and limits of U.S. power, and the interplay between foreign relations and internal developments in the United States,” she says.

Noble says both Ocobock and Tinio McKenna are exciting additions to the history faculty. “These are two terrific young people with great intelligence and enormous energy and enthusiasm,” he says.

Learn More >

History Alumna Inspires New Generation of College Students

2011-09-12T10:00:00-04:00

Providing Opportunities

In 2011–12, 321 NCAC-trained college counselors will reach more than 110,000 students at 368 underserved high schools across the country.

Educational Impact

It also allowed her to develop the skills she relies on every day to help fulfill that mission.

Hurd, who says she “fell in love with history” during her time at Notre Dame, went on to receive her master’s from Georgetown University and a doctoral degree from the University of Virginia.

Learn More >

National College Advising Corps
Nicole Hurd bio page
Hurd NBC interview video
NBC Making a Difference video
College Guide Program, now the Virginia College Advising Corps
Read Helping Students Navigate the Path to College online
American Marshall Memorial Fellowship

Recent Books From Our Faculty

2011-09-12T09:00:00-04:00

Cholera: The Biography

Christopher Hamlin
Professor

Hamlin explores the history of cholera, looking at both the medical success in the West and the different attitudes to the disease in places where it is prevalent. This book is part of the Oxford Biographies of Diseases series, which tells the story of a particular disease or condition throughout history—including the growing medical understanding of its nature and cure as well as shifting social and cultural attitudes, and changes in the meaning of the name of the disease itself.

—Oxford University Press

The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bomb, and the Defeat of Japan

Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C.
Professor

This book looks at the American use of atomic bombs and the role they played in the defeat of the Japanese Empire in World War II. Miscamble focuses on President Harry S. Truman’s most controversial decision, confronting head-on the highly disputed claim that the Truman administration practiced “atomic diplomacy.” He also asks whether it was morally right for the United States to use these weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and offers a balanced evaluation of the relationship between atomic weapons and the origins of the Cold War.

—Cambridge University Press

Read the Wall Street Journal review of The Most Controversial Decision

Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians

Thomas F.X. Noble
Professor

The iconoclast controversies have long been understood as marking major fissures between the Western and Eastern churches. In this book, Thomas F. X. Noble suggests that the lines of division were not so clear and provides the first comprehensive study of the Western response to Byzantine iconoclasm. By comparing art-texts with laws, letters, poems, and other sources, Noble reveals the power and magnitude of the key discourses of the Carolingian world during its most dynamic and creative decades. Winner of the 2011 Otto Gründler Book Prize.

—University of Pennsylvania Press

Clouds of Witnesses: Christian Voices from Africa and Asia

Mark Noll
Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History
with Carolyn Nystrom

As Africa and Asia take their place as the new Christian heartlands, a robust company of saints is coming into view. In 17 narratives, Noll and Nystrom introduce pivotal Christian leaders from these continents who displayed tenacious faith in the midst of deprivation, suffering, and conflict. Spanning a century, from the 1880s to the 1980s, these leaders’ stories demonstrate the vitality of the Christian faith in a diversity of contexts.

—InterVarsity Press

Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind

Mark Noll
Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History

Noll shows how the orthodox Christology confessed in the ancient Christian creeds, far from hindering or discouraging serious scholarship, can supply the motives, guidance, and framework for learning. Christian faith, Noll argues, can richly enhance intellectual engagement in the various academic disciplines—and he demonstrates how by applying his insights to the fields of history, science, and biblical studies, in particular.

—Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism and Ethic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin

Marc Rodriguez
Assistant Professor

Each spring during the 1960s and 1970s, a quarter million farm workers left Texas to travel across the nation to harvest America's agricultural products. During this migration of people, labor, and ideas, Tejanos established settlements nearly everywhere they traveled, influencing concepts of Mexican Americanism in Texas, California, Wisconsin, Michigan, and elsewhere. By providing a view of the Chicano movement beyond the Southwest, Rodriguez reveals an emergent ethnic identity, discovers an overlooked youth movement, and interrogates the meanings of American citizenship.

—The University of North Carolina Press

Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power

Robert Sullivan
Associate Professor

Sullivan offers a portrait of English historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay that probes the cost of power, the practice of empire, and the impact of ideas. His Macaulay is a prominent spokesman for abolishing slavery in the British Empire who cared little for the cause, a soaring parliamentary orator who avoided debate, a self-declared Christian who was a skeptic and secularizer of English history and culture, and a stern public moralist who was in love with his two youngest sisters. Sullivan offers an unsurpassed study of an afflicted genius and a thoughtful meditation on the modern ethics of power.

—Harvard University Press

Religion Enters the Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America

James Turner
Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Professor of Humanities

Religious studies emerged as a field in colleges and universities on both sides of the Atlantic during the late 19th century. In Europe, the discipline grew from long-established traditions of university-based philological scholarship. But in the United States, Turner argues, religious studies developed outside the academy. Until about 1820, he contends, even learned Americans showed little interest in non-European religions. However, growing concerns about the status of Christianity generated American interest in comparing it to other great religions, and the resulting writings eventually produced the academic discipline of religious studies in U.S. universities.

—The University of Georgia Press

Learn More >

Historian Gail Bederman Invited to Institute for Advanced Studies

2011-09-09T14:00:00-04:00

Associate Professor Gail Bederman is the latest faculty member in Notre Dame’s Department of History to accept a prestigious invitation to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey.

One of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry, the IAS collaborates closely with nearby Princeton University but is not formally affiliated with any educational institution.

Beginning in September 2011, Bederman will take a year off from her duties at the University to devote herself full-time to research and writing as an IAS member. Only about 190 scholars are chosen each year for membership at the institute; more than 1,500 typically apply.

Bederman joins a long list of other Department of History faculty who have been accepted as IAS members, including Professor and Medieval Institute Director Olivia Remie Constable; William P. Reynolds Professor of History Felipe Fernández-Armesto; Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., Professor of Arts and Letters Sabine MacCormack; Associate Professor Alexander Martin; Professor Thomas F.X. Noble (twice); Associate Professor Julia Adeney Thomas; and Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History John Van Engen.

Human Interconnectedness

In the same halls once walked by distinguished IAS faculty like Albert Einstein, George Kennan, and Robert Oppenheimer, Bederman will finalize research that she hopes will shed light on an ongoing confrontation of historic proportions in the United States—the clash over abortion.

Bederman’s focus is the intellectual roots of this persistent debate.

“If Martians came from outer space and landed on earth, they would probably be surprised to discover people were arguing over whether the pregnant woman or her unborn child were the primary ‘independent property owning individuals’ and whose claim was superior to the other’s,” she says. “It is an odd way to talk about human interconnectedness.”

Bederman has been able to unearth some little-known connections, literally hidden in the margins, between the modern moral clash over abortion and previous intellectual disputes of the 17th and 18th centuries.

To most Americans today, it seems logical—even inevitable—to frame this moral and intellectual conflict in terms of competing property rights, derived out of the 17th-century political philosophy of John Locke. Bederman says following that intellectual template leads to an inevitably bitter fight over individual human rights—the child, to life; or the mother, to liberty—that has quagmired the issue since abortion was legalized in 1973.

Bederman says her research is about “going back in history to find out how that happened.”

Back to the Future

She begins by asking how inevitable it was that this conflict is framed by the competing rights of individuals and develops a new understanding of the conflict by way of Thomas Malthus.

In Malthus’ attempts to tamp down the advance of the radically egalitarian philosophies of political philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband, William Godwin, Bederman finds some of the origins of the contemporary cultural stalemate.

After examining Mathus’ “marginalia,” the running commentary he jotted in the page margins of Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s writing, Bederman comes to the surprising conclusion that Malthus was initially inspired to compose his famous treatise on the inexorability of overpopulation as a satiric counter to Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s beliefs.

Bederman locates the roots for various modern efforts to contain population, curtail welfare payments, and “privatize” childrearing within Malthus’ gloomy assessments of the threat of overpopulation and the undue burden he believed poor children placed on the nation’s taxpayers.

As a counterpoint, she perceives in Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s efforts to relieve 18th-century women of their subjugation to the will of their husbands an attempt to promote societal openness to childrearing as a mutually enriching responsibility best shared by community and parents.

From the intellectual threads of this famous discourse, Bederman will use her year at the institute to weave a connection to contemporary assumptions over rights and responsibilities that are, ironically, often used by both sides of the abortion debate.

Her research will no doubt cause some controversy, but it may also promote a rethinking of the roles of both individuals and society in welcoming and nurturing every child.

Restating Not Resolving

Bederman acknowledges that her work may only “restate”—not resolve—the problem of abortion in society. “But it seems to me from studying Catholic Social Teaching that seeing society as a collection of ‘independent property owning individuals’ works for some things but is absolutely fallacious for others.”

The limits of that deeply embedded belief have made it difficult, she suspects, for Americans to fully embrace, much less create practical socio-political expressions of, Catholic Christian notions of the interconnectedness of all people.

“Both sides of the abortion dispute,” says Bederman—those who absolutely prioritize individual rights of the mother and those who support the right to life of unborn children but strive to reduce community obligations in childrearing—“have essentially bought into Malthus.

“And if we can’t find some way to understand that we’re all interconnected,” she says, “that’s where we’ll be stuck.”

Learn More >

Historian John Van Engen Compiles Rare Medieval Writings

2011-09-09T08:00:00-04:00

Around 600 years ago, a new kind of religious community emerged in the Low Countries: lay men and women moved into shared homes and dedicated their lives to prayer, work, and teaching.

Part of a movement known as devotio moderna, the “Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life” supported themselves, in part, by copying books. Each member also kept a personal spiritual diary, among other writings.

But because these households existed outside of a formal religious order, they caused great controversy and were shut down around 1560, says John Van Engen, Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at Notre Dame.

The manuscripts the sisters and brothers produced were scattered, some lost forever.

Revealing History

Over the past 20 years, Van Engen has worked diligently to find and study an enormous number of the writings that came from these religious communities.

In 2008, he published some of his research in the book Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages, which won the John Gilmary Shea and Philip Schaff prizes in 2009, as well as the Otto Gründler Book Prize in 2010.

Now, in July of this year, he is launching an ambitious project to publish the sisters’ and brothers’ writings in critical editions that include both Latin text and English translation.

Van Engen, who served as director of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute from 1986 to 1998, says the project will enhance the University’s research profile and further promote it as a home to one of the nation’s top medieval programs.

“On the whole, people are not doing this kind of work anymore,” he says. “I think it gives us a distinctive quality—and gives our students the kind of skill level that it’s really important to develop.”

Funded through a $100,000 grant from the University, the three-year project will include four post-doctoral fellows. As Van Engen recalls, he was in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship when he first became interested in tracking down these devotio moderna texts.

“It was the historian in me, digging and finding texts and then finding more texts and trying to figure out how they related,” he says. “And then at a certain point I thought—well this all needs to be put out there so that the next generations of historians can read it.”

Sharing Scholarship

The manuscripts Van Engen has gathered include both published and unpublished texts that fall into seven broad genres: "Lives" (Vitae), "Letters" (Epistolae), "Exercises" (Exercitia et proposita), "Sayings" (Dicta), "Customaries" (Consuetudines), "Defenses" (Apologiae), and "Privileges" (Privilegia et consilia), Van Engen says.

For the next three years, Van Engen and his team will work on the “Lives” and “Letters.” The 29 Lives are memorials written upon the death of a brother or sister, while the letters show the often difficult realities the brothers and sisters experienced.

None of these texts currently exist in critical editions, Van Engen says, but one goal of the project is to make them available in a searchable format online, as well as in published form, with facing Latin text and English translation.

After this first phase, Van Engen plans to continue the project with the remaining genres. He estimates that when complete, the works will form at least 10 volumes.

Such an extensive project would not be possible without assistance, Van Engen says. While joint credit will be given for the project on curriculum vitae, the post-doctoral fellows will be listed first for their work.

“I want them to learn from it,” he says. “And I don’t need credit anymore. I’m more concerned about getting this out there for scholars.”

Learn More >

History Department Announces Inaugural Klier Prize Winners

2011-09-08T12:00:00-04:00

Undergraduate student Thomas Dugan and graduate student Susy Sánchez have been named the recipients of the 2010–11 John Doyle Klier Prizes for scholarship and service to the University of Notre Dame’s Department of History.

The new awards program is named for the late John Klier ’66, a history major who also received his master’s in history from Notre Dame and went on to become the Sidney and Elizabeth Corob Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College, London.

During his career, Klier was considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of Russia’s Jews from the late 18th century to the Soviet era.

“John Klier was respected as a scholar and admired as a teacher,” says Thomas F.X. Noble, professor and former chair of the department.

Undergraduate Excellence

Klier prize recipient Thomas Dugan spent three years in the history department as a major and a student worker before receiving his bachelor’s degree in May 2011.

Daniel Graff, director of undergraduate studies for the department, says Dugan “became the de facto undergraduate embodiment of the history community” at Notre Dame, acting as a department resource for younger students and even participating in faculty candidate interviews.

“I can’t think of another undergraduate in my decade at Notre Dame who has better combined academic success and service to the Department of History,” Graff says.

Dugan’s scholarship as a history major culminated in his senior thesis on the Chesapeake Bay region, which explored the way landscapes are both perceived and created by human and non-human actors.

“I examine how the advent of railroads to Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the late 19th century enabled the development of commodity networks that redefined the relationships between humans and the environments they inhabit,” he says.

Graduate Scholarship

Susy Sánchez, the first student in the department’s new doctoral track in Latin American history, received the Klier award for her research.

“Her dissertation examines the ways in which three radically different political regimes in Nicaragua have worked to reshape national myths, histories, and symbols—and, thus, the very identity of the nation,” says Ted Beatty, associate professor and Sánchez’s dissertation adviser.

By tracing and explaining the political manipulation of Nicaraguan history and national memory from 1936 on, Beatty says, Sánchez is shedding light on how the country is a uniquely compressed case of the extent to which political regimes seek to craft national identity and the limits of those efforts.

In addition to teaching an undergraduate course on Latin American independence, Sánchez has already published several articles and chapters on her work and is expected to finish her dissertation in spring 2012.

Distinguished Alumnus

This is the first year for the Klier awards in Notre Dame’s Department of History. They honor outstanding work by undergraduates, graduate students, and professors. Noble was the recipient of this year’s Klier Professor Research Award.

The Klier family has set up similar memorial prizes at three other institutions with which John Klier, who died in 2007, was associated. Each year, prizes will be awarded at one of the four universities: Notre Dame; University of Illinois; University College, London; and Fort Hays State University in Kansas.

After completing his master’s degree at Notre Dame, Klier went on to study at the University of Illinois, from which he received his Ph.D. in Russian history. He then taught at Fort Hays State University before moving overseas to teach in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College, London.

John Klier was also an All-American fencer during his time at Notre Dame and, in fact, came from a Notre Dame family. His father, Eugene Paul Klier ’40, played basketball for the Irish and later helped coach the team while he pursued a Ph.D. in metallurgy; his uncle Leo Anthony Klier ’46 was also a basketball player, and a two-time All-American for the sport.

Learn More >

A Letter From the Chair

2011-09-07T13:00:00-04:00

I am delighted to have been named chair of the Department of History at Notre Dame. That said, I have some big shoes to fill: Both my predecessors—John McGreevy, current dean of the ND College of Arts and Letters, and Tom Noble, former director of the Medieval Institute—did admirable jobs in leading the department.

These are exciting times for us. Our most recent class of graduating seniors not only wrote fascinating honors theses on a broad range of topics but also graduated to some impressive jobs in, among other things, business consulting, corporate finance, and public history. We have placed our students in some of the top law schools, medical schools, and graduate schools of business as well as some of the leading graduate training programs in history, such as those at University of Virginia and University of Wisconsin. Other recent graduates are also pursuing service opportunities with the Alliance for Catholic Education and Teach for America.

The success of these young men and women is impressive but not surprising. Our rigorous course of study prepares them to think analytically and imagine conceptually, to write well, and to argue persuasively. Our history program stands at the center of a university that prides itself on a tradition of liberal education.

Our graduate program is flourishing as well. Among the recent highlights:

Heath Carter won a major fellowship for research on labor in turn-of-the-century Chicago and published an award-winning article in a first-rate journal—no mean feat for even a more senior scholar;
Josh Kercsmar, a graduate student focusing on early American intellectual, religious, and environmental history, presented at the annual meeting of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts—a real distinction of note in this field; and
Andrea Turpin, who just defended a dissertation exploring gender and secularization at American universities, accepted a tenure-track position at Baylor.

The health of both our graduate and undergraduate programs, of course, reflects the vitality of our faculty.

Fr. Robert Sullivan has been promoted to full professor, in part on the merits of his well-reviewed study on Macaulay.

Dan Graff, our director of undergraduate studies, was awarded major teaching and research awards this year. Tom Noble had by anyone’s estimation an annus mirabilis. He was awarded the College of Arts and Letters’ preeminent teaching prize, won the major book award for medieval history, published a new book, and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. (Notre Dame, I hasten to add, leads the nation in garnering NEH grants—and, we can say immodestly, history has won more than any other department on campus.) As you read this newsletter, be sure to check out the accomplishments of Gail Bederman, John Van Engen, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, and the many recent books by our faculty.

Finally, I am also pleased to welcome two new colleagues: Rebecca McKenna and Paul Ocobock.

The continuing quality of our program shows in the most recent National Research Council rankings. Our history department is now regarded as a Top 20 program—and has made more gains than any other department at Notre Dame. We have much of which to be proud.

If you are on campus, I encourage you to stop in for a visit. We are grateful for your interest and support—as we also have much more still to do.

Patrick Griffin

Madden-Hennebry Professor of History
Chair, Department of History

Dr. Noble Elected VP of ACHA

2011-07-08T16:40:00-04:00

Former chair of the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame, Thomas F.X. Noble, has been elected vice president of the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA) in 2011 and will become its president in 2012. Noble is a professor of history and former director of the Medieval Institute in the College of Arts and Letters.

Dr. Fernandez-Armesto Receives New Appointment

2011-07-08T16:40:00-04:00

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, has been appointed the 2011 Cátedra Hispano-Británica Reina Victoria Eugenia at the Complutense University of Madrid.