Women In Arts and Letters // Women In Arts and Letters

Political Scientist's New Book Shows Impact of Education on Voter Participation in Mali

2015-12-11T15:00:00-05:00

In a new book, Education and Empowered Citizenship in Mali (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), Jaimie Bleck, an assistant professor of political science and a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow, explores the relationship between schooling, political knowledge, and political participation in Mali, where access to education nearly tripled in the two decades following the country’s 1991 transition to multiparty democracy.

Most African countries have focused on education as a strategy to improve human development, Bleck said, but in her research she took a different perspective, investigating how education contributes to building democratic citizenship and engagement. She explores the effect of different types of schooling—public, private, and secular—on the political knowledge and engagement of both students and their parents in Mali, where citizens are skeptical about electoral politics and the state more generally.

“I find that education in any school type empowers citizens to learn more about politics,” she said. “The Malian schooling expansion has created more capable citizens by heightening individuals’ ability to process and evaluate political information.”

Education also appears to connect parents more closely with the state and bolster their political participation. Bleck finds that parents who send their children to public school are more likely to engage in electoral politics than other citizens. She also demonstrates that increasing levels of education are associated with increases in more engaged forms of political participation, including campaigning, willingness to run for office, and contacting government officials.

The research has clear implications for policy, both in Mali, now entering its second democratic transition, and in other developing countries.
“The evidence demonstrates that education can foster political empowerment, both as a way to gain more knowledge about politics and as a boost to internal efficacy,” Bleck said, calling education a prime example of what social scientists call “welfare services.”

“Based on my research, I suggest that the newly elected government use expanded service provision as a tool to generate legitimacy and spur citizen engagement. My findings highlight a policy feedback effect: citizens exposed to state welfare services will be more willing to engage with the state at the ballot box. Exposure to concrete proof of the state’s capacity can help citizens to overcome skepticism about democracy and to make their voices heard.”

The book grows out of Bleck’s Cornell University Ph.D. dissertation, which garnered her the 2011 Lynne Rienner Award for Best Dissertation in African Politics from the American Political Science Association’s Africa Politics Conference Group.

She draws on original data from a year of fieldwork in Mali, including surveys of 1,000 citizens, exit polls during municipal elections, interviews with students, parents, and educators, and government schooling data, as well as interviews with Malian educators and government officials.

“Bleck presents a thought-provoking study of the political implications of expanded education in Africa’s democratizing countries,” says Leonardo Arriola of the University of California, Berkeley, a former Kellogg visiting fellow.

“These findings will likely inform the next generation of research on political behavior not only in African countries where the future of democracy remains in doubt, but also in Muslim-majority countries where public institutions must increasingly compete with Islamic and private alternatives in service provision.”

Currently an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellow, Bleck is now conducting field research on the role of the local discussion groups known as “grinw” in rebuilding civil society and democracy in Mali. She recently wrote in the Monkey Cage about the importance of governance to the current situation in Mali.

Previously, she and former Kellogg Visiting Fellow Philippe LeMay-Boucher, an economist from Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University, received USAID funding from the Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (DRG Center) for their collaborative research on grinw. They will present their findings at USAID on December 9.

Originally published at kellogg.nd.edu.

Graduate Students Organize Medieval Seminar, Offer Insights on Women in Religious Texts

2015-12-11T14:00:00-05:00

Three medievalist scholars presented a range of papers on medieval women and religious writings during the Holy Water and Saintly Ink seminar at the London Global Gateway on November 24.

Leanne MacDonald and Marjorie Harrington, both doctoral students from the University of Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters and graduate fellows at the London Global Gateway, organized the seminar, while Hetta Howes of the Queen Mary University of London School of English and Drama was also invited to talk.

“The seminar was a great way to connect with the London academic community, and present work to an audience outside of my immediate scholarly community,” MacDonald said.

MacDonald opened proceedings with her presentation, which offered an insight into interpretations of gender identity in medieval writings about Saint Eugenia of Rome. After the seminar, MacDonald pointed out that her paper was largely made possible through access to unique academic resources available in London.

“The paper I gave at the seminar was based on manuscript research that I have carried out this semester while I have been staying in London with access to The British Library, so it was nice to be able to show off some of the results of what I’ve been working on.”

Harrington’s presentation focused on language and identity in The Book of Margery Kempe – considered by some to be the English language’s first autobiography – and made great use of The British Library’s digitized version of the text.

“The seminar brought together a diverse group of scholars and non-specialists. Presenting a paper to an audience with such wide-ranging backgrounds and degrees of interest in medieval literature led me to re-conceptualize my research in order to formulate just what is so compelling about The Book of Margery Kempe," Harrington said.

Howes closed the event with her talk, entitled Bathing and Immersion: water and blurred boundaries in The Doctrine of the Hert, in which she analyzed the significance of water imagery utilized throughout a range of historical texts.

Each of the speakers fielded questions from the audience at the end of their talks, and Harrington said that part of the seminar proved to be particularly helpful.

“Seeing how the audience reacted to the divisive figure of Margery was an especially valuable opportunity for me because this is a text I will teach to students regularly,” Harrington said.

Warren J. von Eschenbach, academic director of the London Global Gateway, attended the seminar and said he was pleased to hear that Notre Dame students were able to broaden their research capacity by accessing London resources.

“This was an insightful seminar and I’m particularly delighted to see that resources available here in the U.K. have been able to add a new dimension to the research and scholarship being conducted by London Global Gateway Graduate Fellows.”

Originally published at international.nd.edu.

English Professor Named to National Book Foundation's '5 Under 35' List

2015-12-11T14:00:00-05:00

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, assistant professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of English, has been named one the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35.

The honor is bestowed to top young fiction writers selected by past National Book Award winners and finalists.

Van der Vliet Oloomi, the author of Fra Keeler, was chosen for the list by novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who was a 5 Under 35 honoree after publishing The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears in 2007.

“I’m grateful to have been one of this year’s honorees, and particularly honored to have been selected by Dinaw Mengestu,” Van der Vliet Oloomi said. “It’s a privilege to be in his lineage, as well as that of previous awardees.”

The five honorees were recognized at a ceremony in New York on Nov. 16 hosted by TV star and producer LeVar Burton. They will participate in the 5 Under 35 Reading Series, presented by the foundation and the Library of Congress, and also appear at a special event in Miami, Florida, in the spring in conjunction with Miami Book Fair International.

In March, Van der Vliet Oloomi was named a 2015 Whiting Award winner for “early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.” Previous winners include Jonathan Franzen, Alice McDermott, and David Foster Wallace.

Van Der Vliet Oloomi also recently received a fellowship from The MacDowell Colony, where she will be a writer-in-residence during the month of August.

Her 2012 debut novel, Fra Keeler, earned critical acclaim for its “chilling,” “surreal,” and “humorously associative meditation” about a man who investigates the death of the former owner of his newly purchased house. The book has been translated into Italian, available from Giulio Perrone Editore in Rome this May.

She is currently working on Taüt, which she describes as “a bizarre love story and the journey of a lifetime through the Western Mediterranean … a darkly comic novel that explores the relationship between literature, space, and mortality from the point of view of a narrator who suffers from intense bouts of literature sickness.”

In addition, she is writing a collection of short stories—one of which was recently published in The Brooklyn Rail.

Van der Vliet Oloomi recently taught an undergraduate course called Walking, Writing, Thinking to an “exceptionally engaged and talented group of students.” She also developed a rigorous graduate level literature seminar for M.F.A. students called Introspection and Voyage: Examining Narrative Across Time. Students read texts that range from the medieval to the contemporary, explore “the genealogy of radical literature,” and engage with literary traditions from around the world.

Originally published by Arts and Letters at al.nd.edu on December 03, 2015.

Professor Sandra Gustafson Awarded NEH Fellowship

2013-01-10T14:00:00-05:00

Sandra M. Gustafson, professor of English and concurrent professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship to write a book on conflict and democracy in classic American novels.

The new book will analyze major conflicts in American history, including the current “culture of conflict” in the U.S. It also will explore the quest to resolve conflicts democratically—as portrayed in the work of writers ranging from James Fenimore Cooper, who published his first frontier fiction in the 1820s, to contemporary novelist Leslie Marmon Silko.

The book will draw heavily on the fields of peace studies and conflict transformation, says Gustafson, who has been a faculty fellow at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies since 2010.

The NEH proposal originated in a course she taught in fall 2011, Conflict and Democracy in Classic American Fiction, offered by the Department of English and by peace studies. She credits Kroc faculty members David Cortright (author of Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas) and John Paul Lederach (author of The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace) as significant influences on her new project.

Gustafson is the author of several books on American literature and culture. This is her second NEH grant; the first (2002-3) was for Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago, 2011).

Faculty in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters Notre Dame have been awarded 49 NEH fellowships between 1999 and 2013—more than any other university in the country. Gustafson is one of three Arts and Letters faculty to receive NEH fellowships for academic year 2013-14.

Deborah Tor was awarded an NEH grant for “The Great Seljuq Sultantate and the Formation of Islamic Civilization, 1040-1194.” An assistant professor in the Department of History, Tor specializes in the political, social, religious, and military history of the medieval Middle East and Central Asia, from the rise of Islam until the 13th century.

Stephen Dumont, a professor in the Department of Philosophy, will use his award to work on a project titled “The Two Affections of the Will: From Anselm of Canterbury to John Duns Scotus,” which will examine the development of the concept of free will in the late medieval period. For the past two years, Dumont has also been a member of the NEH Collaborative Grant at Notre Dame to edit the Parisian works of Duns Scotus.

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Originally published by Joan Fallon at al.nd.edu on December 21, 2012.

Russian Scholar Alyssa Gillespie Wins Translation Award

2012-12-03T14:00:00-05:00

Notre Dame Associate Professor Alyssa Gillespie has won first prize in the 2012 Compass Translation Competition for her adroit translation of Marina Tsvetaeva’s “The Poem of the End.” She also received a fourth place prize for translating a brief selection from Tsvetaeva’s poem “Magdalene.”

“Tsvetaeva is a brilliant, compelling, exhilarating poet whose voice has not yet been heard enough in the Anglophone world,” Gillespie says. “I’m so glad that this competition was dedicated to her . . . and I’m honored and humbled that my translation was chosen to receive first place.”

Sponsored by the Cardinal Points Literary Journal, the Compass Award spotlights English translations of Russian poetry. This year’s contest focused on Tsvetaeva, an early 20th century Russian poet whose work is considered among the greatest in the Russian literary canon.

These latest honors are the third and fourth poetry translation awards Gillespie, co-director of the Notre Dame’s program in Russian and East European studies, has received in just over a year. She took second prize in last year’s Compass Competition and a joint third-place prize in the 2011 Joseph Brodsky–Stephen Spender Prize competition.

Exceptional Artistry

Her first-place piece this year, “The Poem of the End,” is a long-form narrative poem Tsvetaeva wrote in 1924 that describes the waning hours of a fiery affair.

Tsvetaeva captures the emotional intensity of the affair’s end with incredible virtuosity, Gillespie says, but this exceptional artistry made the poem difficult to translate.

“Its varied rhythms, dense sound structures, and play with words are essential to the poem’s aesthetic effect and meanings,” she says.

“I had to find ways to retain these features of the poem while also conveying its semantic meanings accurately.”

Creative Kinship

By the time she began translating the piece, Gillespie was already quite familiar with the poet, who was the subject of her first book, A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva (University of Wisconsin Press). This made it easier for her to connect to the poet’s inner voice.

“She is the poet to whom I feel closest of all, both creatively and temperamentally,” Gillespie says. “With this award, it’s as though the private kinship I’ve felt with Tsvetaeva ever since I first discovered her work over 20 years ago has now been somehow publicly affirmed. I simply couldn’t be more thrilled.”

Gillespie has already begun her next work on Tsvetaeva, an article on tree symbolism in her poetics. Gillespie is also currently working on a new preface for a Russian-language edition of A Russian Psyche, which will be published by the Pushkin House at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.

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Originally published by Chris Milazzo at al.nd.edu on December 03, 2012.

Psychology Professor Seeks Clues to Psychiatric Disorders in DNA

2012-12-03T14:00:00-05:00

Data, data everywhere. In genomics research, there is a data deluge, and so innovative ways to analyze all that information will play a critical role in future breakthroughs.

Gitta Lubke, associate professor of psychology at Notre Dame, is at the forefront of developing new statistical methods to help find DNA markers that are related to psychiatric disorders—and spur further research regarding individual patients’ conditions.

“Understanding the biological causes of psychiatric disorders and their interplay with environmental risk factors is a prerequisite of a successful, personalized approach to treatment,” Lubke says.

Investigating Alternative Methods

The DNA data that Lubke and her colleagues use consist of very large numbers of genetic markers—the spots in DNA where base pairs can differ between people.

“The idea is to check whether more people with a disorder have, for example, ‘A’ rather than ‘T’ in a given spot than people without that disorder,” Lubke says. “If so, you can look at whether that spot in the genome corresponds to a gene and then look at the protein that is coded and what it does.”

The current approach is to test all genetic markers separately, requiring millions of tests, and to use a case/control variable for the disorder. “But that variable often doesn’t do justice to something as complex as Borderline Personality Disorder, for instance,” Lubke explains. “Testing each genetic marker separately is not necessarily optimal.”

Thus, she and her students are investigating alternative methods and comparing them to the standard approach. To support a project called “MRI: Acquisition of a Data Analytics Cluster for Computational Social Science,” Lubke and several colleagues were also recently awarded a $452,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Conducting International Research

Lubke’s other main project right now is a borderline personality study in collaboration with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU University) in The Netherlands, where she received her Ph.D.

This collaboration gives her access to a very large data collection—the Netherlands Twin Register, which has been collecting data since the 1980s and recently added a biobank with genetic data and other biomarkers.

The borderline project includes a study on how best to model questionnaire data, a genome-wide search for relevant genetic markers using standard methods, and the application of alternative methods.

Lubke’s other projects with VU range from studies on internalizing and externalizing problems and well-being to a pilot program for graduate-student exchanges that allows a Notre Dame quantitative psychology student to study and research at VU while Notre Dame hosts two of VU’s biological psychology students. Moving forward, Lubke hopes to secure additional funding to expand the program and to enhance the student experience by making housing and courses available to visiting students.

“International experience not only looks good on a CV,” she says, “but also opens new horizons and offers ample opportunity to collaborate and network.”

Finding Solutions Together

At Notre Dame, Lubke’s research includes projects looking at resilience in later-life (with Professor Cindy Bergeman) and the validity and utility of a two-part system for personality disorder diagnosis (with principal investigator Lee Anna Clark, the William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Professor of Psychology).

“All of these projects are interesting and fun—my only problem is that I need to come up with a method to somehow stretch the 24 hours a day has,” Lubke says.

“I really enjoy the process of discovering bits and pieces of answers, and putting them together. I guess I’d be pretty bored if answers had already been found to all questions. Of course, there’s a good bit of frustration at times, but that’s part of it.”

Lubke takes great pride in being part of Notre Dame’s impressive quantitative psychology program, from the far-ranging expertise of faculty to its collaborations with other colleagues inside and outside the department.

“Our faculty represents such a wide scope of different topics within quantitative methodology that you can always find an expert when faced with a specific question. This is a great advantage for students and faculty alike.”

Getting Students Involved

In the classroom, Lubke’s teaching is directly related to her research. She is currently updating her Mixture Modeling course, for example, to include new approaches to modeling complex human behavior.

“That way students can get new ideas how best to analyze their data, and it benefits my own research.”

Lubke says she is inspired by her experience as a student-teacher when she attended the University of Amsterdam. To address low scores on stats exams, the institution assigned all undergraduates to small work-groups that met several times a week.

“The groups were led by seniors like myself, and our task was to design small, practical, and fun exercises that helped students understand stats and actually like it,” she recalls. “Figuring out a didactic way of explaining concepts in small steps was the dominant theme, and it’s still central in my teaching.”

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Originally published by Aaron Smith at al.nd.edu on December 03, 2012.

Two Scholars Join Notre Dame Romance Languages Faculty

2012-10-16T10:00:00-04:00

Notre Dame’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures expands its faculty by two this year with the addition of Sarah Ann Wells, assistant professor of Brazilian and Spanish-American literature and culture, and Diana Roxana Jorza, an assistant professor of modern peninsular literature.

Both new hires say they were drawn to Notre Dame by the University’s collaborative, interdisciplinary atmosphere and impressive, engaged students.

According to Wells, the class she taught as part of her on-campus interview was full of well-prepared undergraduates brimming with intelligent questions and arguments. “I’m excited to be joining the faculty here,” she says.

Sarah Ann Wells

Wells specializes in 20th-century Argentine and Brazilian narrative, with a focus on the interwar period and avant-garde practices, the relationship between modernism and mass culture, theories of history, film and visual culture including science fiction, and trans-national literatures of the Americas.

She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught for the past three years as an assistant professor at the University of Iowa.

“From the very beginning of our search for a Brazilianist, Sarah emerged as the top candidate, and she only grew in our estimation through subsequent stages of the process,” says Professor Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Albert J. and Helen M. Ravarino Family Director of Dante and Italian Studies.

“Working in both Brazil and Spanish Latin America, Sarah stands out for her versatile scholarly profile and her gifts as a teacher,” he says.

In Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, Wells plans to teach an undergraduate course on Brazilian literature and cultures in spring 2013 as well as an introductory course on Portuguese-language Brazilian cinema. She also hopes to offer a graduate course on a seminar on transnational modernisms.

Wells is currently writing a book about the relationships among literature, film, and radio in Brazil during the 1930s. “Modernism was a global phenomenon, but in Latin America it is bound up with questions of post-colonialism,” she says. “After a rash of military coups in the 1930s, there was a big shift from celebrating new literature and media to a more melancholy outlook, also inspired by the industrialization and decreasing novelty of television and cinema during the period.”

As a new faculty member, Wells says she is impressed by the University’s commitment to Latin America and the opportunity to collaborate with other departments and centers in the College of Arts and Letters and across the University, including the Institute for Latino Studies and Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

Notre Dame “is a place where I can spread my wings and grow as a scholar and teacher,” Wells says.

Diana Jorza

A native of Arad, Romania, Jorza’s academic interests include modern and contemporary peninsular Spanish literature and culture, Spanish intellectual history, film and cultural studies, serial literature, humor, and comedy.

“Diana’s appointment,” Cachey says, “contributes significantly to an emerging area of focus in film and literature in our department, and she brings to our curriculum excellent preparation on a wide range of scholarly topics in Spanish literature and culture from the 19th to the 21st century. We’re delighted to welcome her.”

Jorza is currently completing her Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures at Princeton University with a dissertation titled “Screwball, Disparate, and Dark Comedy: Forging an Alternative Public Sphere in Postwar Spain.”

While Spain has evolved with lightning quickness since dictator Francisco Franco died 1975, Jorza says, Spanish women were legally required as late as the early 1970s to gain permission from their husbands to work.

“The postwar screwball comedies put forth some of the first alternative models for gender roles, love, and family that contemporary Spaniards could access,” she says. “I argue that the portrayal of rebellion, confusion, and comedy is subversive even if it is presented as a ridiculed counter-model.”

In spring 2013, Jorza will teach a survey course on peninsular Spanish literature from the late 18th to the 21st century and possibly a survey course on Spanish cinema as well.

At Notre Dame, she hopes to collaborate with other Arts and Letters faculty in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre and the Ph.D. in Literature Program. With comparative literature experience involving British, American, German, French, and the Slavic languages (in addition to Spanish and Portuguese), Jorza says the Ph.D. program “was a major attraction to me, and I’m looking forward to being a part of it.”

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Originally published by Mark Shuman at al.nd.edu on October 16, 2012.

Political Scientist Eileen Hunt Botting Wins Book Award

2012-10-09T10:00:00-04:00

Eileen Hunt Botting, an associate professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science, and one of her former Ph.D. students, Sarah L. Houser, recently won the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Edition Award for their book Hannah Mather Crocker’s Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston.

The triennial prize recognizes excellence in the recovery of American women writers. Readers for the award praised the interdisciplinary scope of the book, its collaborative nature, and the way it brings American women’s voices to a larger audience.

“This award is especially meaningful because it comes from a scholarly organization that exists to recognize the voices and stories of women in the American literary and political tradition,” Botting says.

Hannah Mather Crocker, a Bostonian and active supporter of the American Revolution, was the first person in America to publish a book on women’s rights—Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818). She was the great-granddaughter and granddaughter of influential Puritan ministers and the niece of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson.

Houser, who is currently teaching at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, discovered Crocker’s handwritten manuscript for Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston in the archives of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in 2002, while conducting research for a paper she co-authored with Botting.

With the help of four undergraduate assistant editors—Courtney Smotherman, Michael DesJardins, Katie Mastrucci, and John Minser, who are all Class of 2010—Botting and Houser transcribed and published an annotated version of Crocker’s manuscript, which is one of the few major histories of the American Revolution written by a woman.

The resulting book includes Crocker’s first-hand accounts of events leading up to the Revolution and the Siege of Boston, as well as a chronicle of Puritan law, the establishment of Boston churches, the city’s economic growth, and interactions with the British, French and Native Americans.

“Hannah Mather Crocker is one of the most important stateswomen and political philosophers of the early national era,” Botting says. “Her history of Boston aims to educate the ‘rising generation’ to feel pride in their local democratic political practices and inspire the youth to follow the example of their ‘venerable ancestors’ in participating in free and vibrant discussion, dissent, protest, and even rebellion in the public sphere.

“I am thrilled that the Society for the Study of American Women Writers has recognized the first scholarly edition of Crocker’s Reminiscences, for it underscores the historical and political importance of the nearly 200-year-old manuscript we have preserved and shared with future generations, as she wished.”

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Originally published by Kate Cohorst at al.nd.edu on October 09, 2012.

Sacred Music at Notre Dame Receives Mellon Grant

2012-10-03T10:00:00-04:00

With a $400,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Notre Dame announces the launch of the Sacred Music Drama Project, a four-year, cross-disciplinary initiative designed to engage people more deeply with the power of shared creativity, performance, and scholarship.

The project will draw on humanistic, artistic, and sacred topics from a variety of musical traditions to develop new coursework and to stage the production of a major dramatic performance each year. The Mellon grant will also bring both eminent and emerging guest artists to campus and will fund the commission of a new work of sacred music drama at the end of the project.

“We seek to bridge several divides that too often prevent humanistic studies from achieving their highest levels of impact,” says Carmen-Helena Téllez, professor of conducting in the Department of Music and concurrent professor of sacred music in the Department of Theology. “And the first of these divides is between scholarship and practice.

“We believe that the humanities are well served when scholarship and research are directly and immediately performed and experienced, bringing the work of the classroom to life through the embodiment of the ideas studied in books and online.”

Creative Collaborations

Making connections between people in different academic areas across the University is another key goal of the Sacred Music Drama Project, says Téllez, who will chair the faculty committee guiding the project and act as principal investigator for the grant and music director of the projects.

“Our interdisciplinary collaborations will serve to break down traditional boundaries not just between performers and scholars but also between faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students,” she says.

“We hope to link the project to a range of courses that allow people across the humanities and the arts an opportunity to participate in each other’s ‘production processes’ and to test ideas that relate directly to their particular subject disciplines.”

Using a permeable studio model, the Sacred Music Drama Project will also allow participants to explore new modes of presentation by sharing their different perspectives and by combining traditional and new media.

“We hope the successful methodologies that emerge will assist both scholars and artists to discover new collaborative models,” Téllez says.

The Mellon Sacred Music Drama Committee will soon issue an open call for proposals and nominations. Notre Dame faculty from multiple disciplines will be invited to participate in the Sacred Music Drama Project, programming it into their curricula and connecting students with visiting performers, artists, and scholars.

A Wider Community

Studying and staging interdisciplinary works of sacred music drama will do more than connect people and programs on the Notre Dame campus, Téllez believes. The project aims to create and sustain new forms of interaction within the wider community as well by sharing musical experiences and disseminating research findings.

“We hope to establish best practices for dialogue, to produce new and excellent artistic works, to develop innovative technologies—and to leave a filmed documentation of these projects for professionals and students everywhere,” she says.

As a university, Notre Dame is particularly well positioned to generate a national and even international impact with these initiatives, Téllez says.

“We aspire for the Mellon Sacred Music Drama Project to have a lasting influence on the campus culture and the broader community well beyond the University because we can connect with people on a range of topics that matter in today’s world.”

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Originally published by Joanna Basile at al.nd.edu on October 03, 2012.

Authentic or Not, Jesus’ Wife Papyrus Sheds Light on Diversity of Opinion in the Early Church

2012-09-28T16:00:00-04:00

Whether or not it is authenticated, the recent discovery of a purported fourth-century papyrus fragment that quotes Jesus as referring to his wife “has some important ramifications for how we think about the early church,” according to Candida Moss, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

“Even if the text is a modern forgery, it draws attention to a debate about the status of women and the marital status of Jesus himself that scholars know was ongoing in the early church," says Moss, who teaches courses in New Testament and Christian Origins. “It is unclear in this recent discovery to what the key and novel phrase ‘my wife’ refers. Perhaps Jesus is referring to the otherwise unknown Mary as his wife in a spiritual sense in the way that female Christian martyrs were sometimes called his ‘bride’ (for example in the third century Passion of Perpetua and Felicity).

“This story also refers to Jesus as being with the martyrs, in a physical sense, at the time of their deaths, an idea that would make sense of the following sentences of the fragment in which Jesus ‘dwells’ with his wife. Perhaps, as many have noted, Jesus refers to the Church in general as his ‘wife.’ Perhaps, some early Christians thought that Jesus—like the Apostle Peter—had an actual wife. Although, in this case, we should note that there’s no evidence that Jesus himself had a wife, merely that people thought he did.

“Whether or not the text is an authentic ancient text, it doesn’t provide evidence about the historical Jesus, but its announcement has directed us to the fact that there was greater diversity of opinion among early Christians about the status of women than many people realize and that, just like today, the personal example and sayings of Jesus formed the centerpiece of this debate.”

A scholar of Biblical studies and early Christian history, Moss writes and lectures on Biblical and early Christian literature, history and thought. She is the author of The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom and Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Ideologies, and Traditions.

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Originally published at newsinfo.nd.edu.

Christine Becker Connects Scholarship and Social Media

2012-09-26T16:00:00-04:00

When Christine Becker signed up for Twitter in September 2009, the associate professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre wasn’t sure what to expect. What she found was a new way to connect with people in both academia and the television industry, a new source of research and teaching materials, and a vehicle for staying on the leading edge of her scholarly field.

It even led to an invitation to serve as the first online editor of Cinema Journal, a position that begins in January 2013.

“I didn’t even know [the journal’s incoming editor] knew me,” says Becker, who now runs three Twitter accounts and a popular blog, newsfortvmajors.com. “That’s the thing with social media—you don’t ever know who’s watching. Clearly he’d been following my blog, following me on Twitter, and I didn’t even know it. He recognized that I was playing a part in social media in my discipline, and so he offered this new position to me.”

Valuable Connections

Becker says friends from her Ph.D. program at University of Wisconsin initially sparked her interest in Twitter, but connecting with other film and television scholars was just the beginning.

“I have to be careful not to assume more people are on Twitter than there really are, because the statistics say only something like 7 percent of people are on Twitter, but as far as my crowd, the very active TV fan crowd, a significant percentage of us are on Twitter.”

Social media, and Twitter in particular, Becker says, has become a key component of how a number of people experience TV—sharing thoughts and reactions to shows as they watch. “I think there is something about television—that sense of immediacy, that sense of live-ness, the communal kind of experience about TV that really encourages it.”

While fan reactions on Twitter can be “a gold mine for research,” Becker says, she also follows a number of writers, producers, editors, and directors who have joined the social media network. “It’s been an amazing window on the industry and those people are tweeting things we would have never known about behind-the-scenes production.”

And they are noticing her work, too. Already well known among television scholars, Becker’s blog was recently featured on Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast and Hart Hanson, executive producer of the television show Bones, tweeted a link to her site.

“I follow him on Twitter and he tweeted something like, ‘hey look at this, this is really interesting,’” Becker says. “So I clicked the link—and it was my blog! It was absolutely stunning.”

Multiple Platforms

Becker tweets from a personal account @crsbecker, as well as two that are connected to her blog: @N4TVM (News For TV Majors) and @goodTVeets, which compiles the best, funniest, and most insightful tweets from the fans, scholars, and industry insiders she follows.

“It’s work and also it’s fun—I just really enjoy Twitter,” she says. “There’s a component of social interaction with it, building knowledge, keeping up with stuff … One of my favorite things to do is hang out on Twitter and talk with people.”

Launched in late 2009, the News For TV Majors blog is a product of Becker’s experiences on Twitter—a place to collect and share links to all the interesting articles she was finding through the social network.

Earlier that fall semester, Becker had begun sharing the links with students in her Television Narrative class in a private online space. “Then the class ended, and I realized I really liked doing this and the students really liked it,” she says. “So I thought, ‘OK, why not make a blog out of this?’

“There are tons of TV news sites out there but a lot of them, at least for academics, are either too much inside baseball—like this executive got hired here—or they are too celebrity-oriented and centered on gossip,” she says. “I wanted something that was basically academically oriented.”

Lively Discourse

While managing a blog and three active Twitter accounts isn’t easy, Becker says her social media work has been rewarding, both personally and professionally. For instance, she points to one of the scholars she follows on Twitter, who is writing a dissertation on telenovelas.

“He’ll often retweet something I post on my blog about telenovelas and then add some thought of his own and I really love that because it’s someone building on my information as they broadcast what they are doing. When I can see those kinds of connections happening, that’s really gratifying.”

Becker has also built a Twitter list of 60 or 70 British television critics, writers, and viewers who helped inform a class she taught last year on British television and are serving as a resource for her current book project, a study of British and American television over the past decade.

Her first book, It’s the Pictures that Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950’s Television, won the biennial Michael Nelson Prize from the International Association for Media and History in 2011.

Becker, who was recruited to help establish Notre Dame’s television studies program, says it was working on that book that inspired her to switch her focus from film studies to television.

“There’s so much work to be done in television studies,” she says. “Because it is a young field, there are a lot of scholarly gaps to be filled in, and that makes it a really exciting and fun discipline. There’s a lot of innovative research happening.”

Twitter and Teaching

Becker says her blog and Twitter accounts are a central part of her job now—and not just when it comes to research. “It also deeply inflects my teaching.”

This fall, she is teaching an honors seminar called Film, Television, and Theatre Now, which relies heavily on social media to enhance weekly discussion topics.

“The last time I taught it two years ago it was really successful because the students found it thrilling,” she says. “I would give them the academic grounding and readings for each topic, and then we would match that up with things going on right then in the entertainment industry.”

Becker’s teaching and research focuses on three main areas, she says, industry, aesthetics, and reception—and the questions she explores arise from her own interests as a viewer.

“I want to know why I’m so captivated by a show like Breaking Bad,” she says. “How does Breaking Bad tell a story that absolutely rivets me and that makes people lose their mind on Twitter tweeting about how great it is? What is it about that show?

“What standards are we operating under if we call it one of the best ever? How is it produced, what does it look like on a screen, and what is it doing narratively? And then how are people talking about it, receiving it and discussing it? Why do they call it one of the best shows ever?”

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Originally published at ftt.nd.edu.

Psychologist Nicole McNeil Receives APA Award

2012-09-26T16:00:00-04:00

In recognition of her distinguished body of scholarship, University of Notre Dame’s Nicole McNeil has received the 2013 Boyd McCandless Award from the American Psychological Association (APA).

“Past winners of this award are a veritable ‘who’s who’ of developmental science,” says Daniel Lapsley, chair of the Department of Psychology and Alliance for Catholic Education Collegiate Professor of Psychology. “Nicole is keeping very impressive company, and we are proud of her accomplishments.”

McNeil, Alliance for Catholic Education Associate Professor of Psychology, focuses her research on the development of mathematical thinking in various forms. Over the past several years, she has received more than $2 million in funding from the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Science Foundation to continue her research. She also oversees several related, student-led projects.

“Some studies focus on identifying which skills in preschool, kindergarten, and early elementary school are the best predictors of later mathematics achievement and algebra readiness,” McNeil says. “Other studies focus on identifying the cognitive processes involved in children’s understanding and misunderstanding of important math concepts.

“Still other studies focus on the malleability of children’s early mathematical concepts and skills, with the goal of identifying the best ways for parents and teachers to structure children’s environments to help them construct an understanding of important math concepts.”

The Boyd McCandless Award is given annually to someone who has made a “distinguished contribution” to the field of developmental psychology, the dissemination of developmental science, or has conducted programmatic research of distinction. What McNeil finds most rewarding about receiving the award, she says, is that it is based on a scholar’s entire body of work to date, rather than just a singular achievement.

“Thus, I think the award speaks to the selection committee’s recognition of the quality and importance of my research to date,” she says, “as well as their confidence in the enduring impact of my work. … It’s an amazing honor to receive the award. It’s still kind of unbelievable to me.”

As the 2013 Boyd McCandless Award recipient, McNeil will give a talk at the APA’s next annual meeting in Hawaii. She will also head the committee to select the following year’s winner.

“I can’t believe I’ve achieved enough to be included with such an illustrious group of people,” she says. “It certainly is motivating, though. I can only hope that I will be as good of a representative of the award as the previous winners have been.”

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Originally published by Joanna Basile at al.nd.edu on September 26, 2012.

Senior Film Student Wins Princess Grace Award

2012-09-26T15:00:00-04:00

2012 Princess Grace Award winner Kathleen Bracke is producing her own Irish language film.

When Kathleen Bracke got the call, she dropped the phone out of shock, then picked it up and asked the caller to repeat the news. On the other end was a representative of the Princess Grace Foundation-USA announcing that Bracke had won a 2012 Princess Grace Award.

“They were giving me all this information and the whole time I was thinking is this a mistake?” says Bracke, a senior in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) and one of only two winners of this year’s Princess Grace Undergraduate Film Scholarship.

“It’s an international competition and student filmmakers from all of the top-ranked film departments apply,” says Jim Collins, professor and chair of FTT. “The fact that Kathleen won the award against that kind of competition is an indication of just how exceptional her project is.”

Irish Awakening

The narrative film Bracke proposed is nothing if not ambitious. Running about 25 minutes, it follows the story of Aoife, a young girl living on a remote island off Ireland’s western coast, a predominantly Irish-speaking region. “Aoife begins to notice images disappearing from a mural across from her school,” explains Bracke. The images, which represent various aspects of Irish culture, disappear from real life as well, she says.

Robin O’Brien, a senior in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, will design and paint the mural that will serve as a centerpiece to the plot, and a crew of recent FTT graduates will help Bracke shoot her film on location in Ireland during winter break.

An Irish language and literature minor, Bracke wrote the entire script in Ireland’s native language and plans to cast Irish-speaking actors. The use of Irish, which many consider a dying language, fits the film’s theme of cultural loss, she says.

“It intrigues me what happens to a culture when part of it disappears—a song, a dance, an eating habit—whether something replaces it or whether there will always be that void, forever.”

International Experience

Thanks to undergraduate research opportunities through the University’s Nanovic Institute for European Studies and Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement (CUSE), Bracke had the opportunity to travel to Ireland several times in the last few years—and became captivated by the country and its vibrant culture.

“Notre Dame really provided me with the resources I needed to pursue what I love,” she says. “Undergraduate research at Notre Dame is absolutely amazing. There’s no other school that does it as well.”

Now, with funding from the Princess Grace Award, Bracke can delve deeper into the culture of Ireland and bring her perspectives to the rest of the world.

“I love cinematography because I communicate better visually than in words,” she says. “The goal of filmmaking is to let your audience into your view, so it’s really exhilarating to get behind the camera on this project and do that.”

Words and Images

Bracke’s senior thesis film will culminate four years of study and exploration in a diverse array of interests across Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters. Faculty in the Department of Irish Language and Literature sparked her interest in the idea of culture loss and have helped her ensure the linguistic integrity of the script, while mentors in FTT helped her develop as a filmmaker.

“The FTT program gives you opportunities that you wouldn’t expect and you wouldn’t get anywhere else because it has such a small ratio of teacher to students,” she says. “It’s all about experience, and the film program at Notre Dame really gives you that.”

Bracke’s is a success story that the entire College of Arts and Letters can take pride in, Collins says. “I’d love to be able to say that FTT is solely responsible for making Kathleen into a brilliant young filmmaker who is worthy of this recognition but the credit has to be shared,” he says. “It’s proof that the increasing emphasis placed on interdisciplinary, international study, and undergraduate research are all beginning to bear fruit.”

“I think Kathleen has enormous potential,” he adds, “because she combines a very refined visual sense with a fierce determination to see her projects realized. She brings so much to the table in terms of her cinematic, ethnographic, and linguistic skills. She’s going to be powerhouse to be reckoned with, no matter what she decides to do in her career.”

Growing Reputation

The award is a vote of confidence in Bracke’s ability and potential as a filmmaker, and a milestone for FTT as well. She is the department’s second Princess Grace Award recipient in three years. Javi Zubizarreta ’11 won in 2010 for his senior thesis film on Basque shepherds in Idaho.

“It’s obviously very significant for another FTT major to win a Princess Grace Award in such a short time span,” Collins says. “Our goal is to produce smart, sophisticated filmmakers who have the skills—and the courage—to embark on ambitious projects that will make an impact. These awards are irrefutable evidence that our work is being recognized by a very prestigious institution.”

The PGF-USA, a public charity, was formed after the death of Princess Grace in 1982. Its awards for theater, dance and choreography, and film continue the legacy of Princess Grace (Kelly) of Monaco, who helped emerging artists pursue their artistic goals during her lifetime.

Bracke and the other 2012 honorees in theatre, dance, and film will be honored in New York City in October at the annual black-tie Princess Grace Awards Gala, held in the presence of the current Prince and Princess of Monaco.

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Originally published by Eileen Lynch at al.nd.edu on September 13, 2012.

English Professor Laura Dassow Walls Studies Emerson and Science

2012-09-26T15:00:00-04:00

For her contributions to Emerson studies, Laura Dassow Walls, the University of Notre Dame’s William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English, has been awarded the 2012 Ralph Waldo Emerson Society Distinguished Achievement Award.

“Scholarship can be very lonely work,” Walls says, “and when I started out, I wasn’t sure if my sense of the centrality of science to Emerson’s writing—writing that is at the heart of American literature—would be accepted; I went out on something of a limb.

“To have my research honored in this way is enormously encouraging. The more I work, the more the connections between the humanities and the sciences seem to multiply, and this award means that others feel I’ve made a real and lasting contribution. It makes me want all the more to build on what I’ve done, to take it further.”

A Scientific View

So far, Walls’ scholarship on Emerson has included several essays and a book, Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth, which details the integral role science played in Emerson’s thought and writing.

“I argue that when Emerson experienced his religious crisis, which impelled him to quit the ministry, science gave him the sense of order, wholeness, and purpose that enabled him to move to his new career,” she says. “He became a sort of secular minister, a founder of modern thought who explores the broader meaning of a scientific worldview for art, religion, and morality—what Emerson called ‘the conduct of life.’”

In addition to her focus on Emerson specifically, Walls studies 19th century American literature and transcendentalism, particularly where literature and science intersect.

Her most recent book, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award for the best book in American intellectual history, and the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

The book, she says, is about how German scientist and traveler Alexander von Humboldt shaped the early-American intellectual and political landscape—including Emerson, who was one of Humboldt’s first American readers.

“Emerson was very cosmopolitan in his reading, thinking, and traveling,” she says, “and this got me interested in transnationalism, or in other words, the ways in which American literature arises as a response to world literature, including the sciences. I try to bring that larger perspective to bear on the authors I study.”

Currently, Walls is working on a biography of Henry David Thoreau. She says she hopes to correct the stereotypes and misconceptions about him, such as that he was a hermit and misanthrope.

“My first book was on Thoreau and science,” Walls says, “but I now see this as just one part of a much larger story of his life as a poet, philosopher, scientist, and reformer, and I want to tell that story. There is a real need for a new biography of Thoreau; we know a lot more about him than we did even 10 or 15 years ago. … It’s important, if we’re really to have a sustainable future, to realize we share an intellectual ancestor who shows that one needn’t hate humanity in order to love nature.”

In conjunction with her research, Walls will be teaching a yearlong honors seminar in the 2012–13 academic year for first-year students in the Glynn Family Honors Program, making sure to include in her curriculum more than one of Emerson’s works.

An Early Focus

Even before Thoreau and her other academic work, Walls says, there was Emerson.

“When I was still quite young, I found a little volume of Emerson’s Essays in my father’s library,” she says. “It was bound in soft, green leather, and it was small enough to fit into a pocket. The look and feel of this old book intrigued me, and when I started to read it, I was just carried away by Emerson’s voice, so provocative and deep. I carried the book with me for a long time, and I still have it, in a place of honor above my desk.

“Reading Emerson led me to Thoreau, and Thoreau to the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt and beyond to dozens of other interrelated writers and philosophers. I’ve been fascinated by American transcendentalism ever since I first opened that little book.”

Emerson, she says, was her first love in literature—and led her to make a “pretty bold move for a teenage girl”: taking herself seriously as a writer and thinker as she developed her interest in academic scholarship.

“This award honors the deepest roots of my own work in literature and the history of ideas,” Walls says, “and it comes from a wonderful circle of dear friends and colleagues who have been my mentors for many years.”

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Originally published by Joanna Basile at al.nd.edu on August 29, 2012.

Essaka Joshua Honored by Society for Disability Studies

2012-09-07T16:00:00-04:00

The Society for Disability Studies recently presented its Tyler Rigg Award to Essaka Joshua, a teaching professor in Notre Dame’s Department of English and the Joseph Morahan Director of the College Seminar program in the University’s College of Arts and Letters.

Joshua received the accolade—given annually to the best paper in literature and literary analysis published in Disability Studies Quarterly—for “The Drifting Language of Architectural Accessibility in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris.”

It is included in a volume John Duffy, associate professor of English and the Francis O’Malley Director of the University Writing Program at Notre Dame, edited with Melanie Yergeau of the University of Michigan.

Judges called the piece “a smart, fresh, and incisive look at how architecture and disability overlap and inform each other.”

Joshua, who founded Notre Dame’s Disability Studies Forum in 2008, says she was “genuinely thrilled and honored” by the award. “The Society for Disability Studies is the major society for scholars working in the field, and it’s great to be recognized nationally.”

Challenging Assumptions

“Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field within the humanities and social sciences that understands disability to be something more than a medical condition,” Joshua says. “It’s dedicated to recovering a more nuanced history that does justice to the diversity of this important group and its push towards equal rights.”

Joshua’s own journey to disability studies was inspired by reading an essay by Lennard Davis in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism when she was teaching an introduction to literature and critical theory course at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom.

“It outlined the range of prejudicial assumptions that we make about normalcy,” Joshua says. “My students loved it, and I quickly found myself rereading everything differently. On the personal side, as a black woman, I’ve been familiar with prejudice and exclusion all of my life, so it was a natural topic for me, as disability is part of a wider set of social justice issues.”

Teaching is also how she came to her award-winning topic, says Joshua, who offers a College Seminar called Disability. A signature course for all sophomores in the College of Arts and Letters, College Seminar covers a variety of topics each semester. Students explore enduring issues that transcend disciplinary boundaries while honing their analytic and verbal communication skills.

“Aside from Frankenstein, which is also in my Disability seminar, Notre-Dame de Paris is probably the most famous novel about a person with a disability,” Joshua says. “It was an obvious choice for me. It has Catholic subject matter, it’s a classic novel, and this generation of students is very familiar with the Disney film (The Hunchback of Notre Dame).

“It’s probably the novel with the greatest number of characters with disabilities, too,” she says, “so it’s particularly rewarding to teach.”

Embracing Complexity

In her award-winning article, Joshua explores the ways in which Hugo uses the disabled body as a symbol for the cathedral building.

“Quasimodo is Notre Dame because they are both complex, atypical bodies,” she says. “At times, Hugo characterizes the building as a body with multiple disabilities, and at times he describes it as part of Quasimodo’s body. It is his carapace, and he is its contents.”

Unlike the wheelchair user confronted with the staircase, Joshua says, Hugo’s Quasimodo is harmoniously included as the cathedral’s natural contents. “We talk today of the importance of ‘universal design’—designs of buildings or objects that include people with disabilities. Long before this concept, we have Hugo using an inclusive architectural language of disability.”

The novel also was groundbreaking for its portrayal of someone with a disability, she says. “It begins with expressing deep-seated fears that have been traditionally associated with disability, characterizing Quasimodo as evil and frightening. But when Quasimodo breaks free of his subjection and shows compassion and goodness towards Esmeralda, he is transfigured and described as beautiful. It’s a story about breaking free from being brutalized.

“I think that it’s also a story that is as timeless as Beauty and the Beast. It says that inner beauty should be valued more highly than an assumed notion of physical beauty. Both tale types live on in multiple ways today.”

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Originally published by Mike Danahey at al.nd.edu on September 07, 2012.

Psychologist Darcia Narvaez Studies Violent Video Games' Impact on Kids

2010-11-18T14:15:00-05:00

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments this week from some 12 states, urging it to uphold a law that bans the sale of violent video games to children younger than 18. The states, including California and Texas, say that banning sales to minors would provide moral and psychological protection.

University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Darcia Narvaez agrees. Narvaez studies moral and character development in children and the negative effects of violent video games on the developing brain.

“We know now that there are ‘mirror neurons’ in the brain that are activated when one watches someone else take action,” Narvaez says. “In effect, watching someone take action is like practicing it yourself. So when a child plays a video game where they can kill people begging for mercy or burn people alive (as from ‘Postal2’), they are practicing being cruel.”

Expressions of free speech and creativity will be the arguments against a ban, but Narvaez’s research shows a direct correlation between witnessing violence—whether on television or in a video game—and cruel and insensitive behavior.

“When you play a violent video game, you practice it over and over (hundreds if not thousands of times), and what you practice is what you become,” says Narvaez.

Additionally, the player is conditioned to feel pleasure from cruelty to others, since killing, maiming and other violent behaviors are linked to rewards in the game. These rewards, then, decrease empathy for the suffering of others in real life.

Among the negative effects of violent video games on the developing brain of children is the activation of what Narvaez calls the “reptile brain” or the primitive part of the brain that is focused only on threat and reacting to it.

“When violent video games keep the primitive parts of the brain in charge, it takes energy away from the more social and thoughtful parts of the brain,” she says. “Research shows that normal kids immersed in such games develop ‘game brain,’ in which those more thoughtful parts hardly operate at all.”

Department of History Hires Three Scholars

2010-11-18T14:01:00-05:00

Catherine Cangany, Deborah Tor, and Gil-li Vardi joined the Department of History faculty this fall. Although the three women share a passion for teaching and research, their areas of expertise vary widely, from military history to the colonial Midwest to medieval Islamic history.

Catherine Cangany

Assistant Professor Catherine Cangany specializes in history of Early French and British North America, particularly the colonial Midwest. She shares that perspective in her Notre Dame classes on colonial America by including readings from the Huron Mission, a French Catholic outpost near Detroit.

While studying the British colonies as a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, Cangany worked in a Detroit historical museum—and she says it inspired her to combine both areas of interest.

Her current book manuscript, Frontier Seaport, examines colonial Detroit’s interactions with the Atlantic World and argues that settlers sought increased economic and cultural ties to Europe while guarding their political autonomy.

“It was a way to bring colonial Detroit into this field that has largely excluded the frontier,” she says.

In addition to teaching colonial history for history majors this fall, Cangany leads a seminar on Puritans in popular culture for first-year students.

Her new position in the Department of History at Notre Dame allows Cangany to return to her home state, where she received undergraduate degrees in English and classics from Indiana University before deciding history was her true calling.

Her commitment to the Midwest, she says, is part of what drew her to Notre Dame, along with the University’s emphasis on service learning, social justice and community.

Deborah Tor

Assistant Professor Deborah Tor, a specialist in medieval Middle Eastern and Central Asian history, received her Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation on the privatization of Jihad in the 8th century and the rise of independent militias.

Tor completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was subsequently a post-docotral fellow at Harvard, a member of the Society of Fellows at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and then taught for five years as an assistant professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel before coming to Notre Dame.

Tor is currently teaching a graduate course on the Islamic Caliphate and an undergraduate introductory survey of the medieval Middle East.

Tor’s first book, Violent Order: Religious Warfare, Chivalry, and the ’Ayyār Phenomenon in the Medieval Islamic World, was published in 2007. Her new research is on the Turko-Mongol era that started in the region in the 11th century, and her second book, a thematic history of the Great Saljuq Dynasty (1040-1194), will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Tor says she finds Notre Dame’s Catholic identity especially congenial. “It’s a lot closer to the medieval context and the medieval world view,” she says. “To understand medieval history, one has to be able to take religion seriously. Notre Dame was precisely what I was looking for in a university.”

Gil-li Vardi

Assistant Professor Gil-li Vardi is a military historian who researches how armies develop and maintain patterns of thought and action. She applies theories of organization and military culture to the analysis of modern European and Middle Eastern wars, seeking to better understand key decisions made before and during these events.

Vardi is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the evolution of German military ideas and practices in the 1920s and 1930s. She is also conducting research on the origins and dynamics of Israeli military culture.

Vardi did her undergraduate work at Tel Aviv University and received her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before coming to Notre Dame, she was a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

This semester, Vardi is teaching a course on “The Changing Face of War: An Introduction to Military History.”

She chose to join the Notre Dame faculty, Vardi says, because “I wanted to be a part of an academic community that encourages open dialogue and does not shy away from debating contested issues.”

Gender Relations Center to host festival on the quad

2010-04-26T11:14:00-04:00

As part of its Violence Prevention Initiative(VPI), the Gender Relations Center at the University of Notre Dame will host “Now is the Time: Festival on the Quad” Wednesday (April 28) from 5 to 8 p.m. on Notre Dame’s South Quad in celebration of the center’s commitment to overcome sexual and gender violence. The event is free and open to the public.

In case of rain, events will take place in the Oak Room of South Dining Hall. Planned events, all of which are free and open to the public, are:

• 5 to 7:30 p.m. — Student bands performing: The Revelin’ Family Band, Ana Livias DaughterSons, and Pat McKillen
• 7:30 to 8 p.m. – Speak-out of original student writing
• Free food and corn hole games
• Donations accepted for the rape crisis center of St. Joseph County

VPI strives to raise awareness about violence in the local community, increase understanding about global violence, promote the healing of survivors of violence, fundraise for local non-profits invested in violence prevention and/or service to survivors of violence, and serve as a flagship for violence prevention programming on Catholic campuses.

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Contact: Elizabeth Moriarty, assistant director, Gender Relations Center, 574-631-9340, emoriarty@nd.edu

Originally published by Elizabeth Moriarty at newsinfo.nd.edu on April 26, 2010.

Kerby-Fulton wins 2010 Haskins Gold Medal for "Books Under Suspicion"

2010-04-15T11:39:00-04:00

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, has received the 2010 Haskins Gold Medal from the Medieval Academy of America for her work, “Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England.” This award is given annually to a book, published in the previous six years, that is judged to be distinguished in the field of Medieval studies.

“It is rare that a book requires the reevaluation of major writers and movements in both Latin and the vernacular, in the realm of both theological treatises and literary art, permitting us to see both discourses as parts of a broader fabric,” the committee announced in presenting the award. “Kerby-Fulton’s magnum opus presents a fresh panorama of theology, literature, and history in the age of Chaucer with an originality that promises to have an impact across numerous disciplines within and beyond Medieval studies for years to come.”

“Books Under Suspicion,” published by University of Notre Dame Press, explores censorship and tolerance of controversial revelatory theology in England from 1329 to 1437, suggesting that writers and translators as different as Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, “M.N,” and Margery Kempe positioned their work to take advantage of the tacit toleration that both religious and secular authorities extended to this type of writing. Kerby-Fulton makes use of neglected material in manuscripts and archives to construct an acclaimed revisionist account of theological politics in late medieval England and academic freedom in universities of the time.

A member of the Department of English faculty at Notre Dame since 2005, Kerby-Fulton also is affiliated with the College of Arts and Letter’s Medieval Institute.

“The Haskins Medal is an extraordinary recognition of the achievement of a scholar who has in just a few years become absolutely central to Notre Dame’s high place in the world of Medieval studies and our doctoral program,” said John Sitter, chair of the Department of English, says. “Our colleague Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s award of course shines a light on her important work, but it also brightens the department, the Medieval Institute and the University.”

“Books Under Suspicion” also was awarded the John Ben Snow Prize from the American Conference on British Studies in 2007. That prize is awarded annually for the best book by a North American scholar in any field of British Studies dealing with the period from the Middle Ages through the 18th century.

Kerby-Fulton specializes in Middle English literature and related areas of medieval studies. She has written several books and articles on medieval literary writers, including “Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman.” Her edited collections include “Written Work: Langland, Labour and Authorship with Steven Justice; Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman” with Denise Despres; and “Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages” with Linda Olson.

The Medieval Academy of America, founded in 1925, is the largest professional organization in the world devoted to Medieval studies. The Haskins Medal was established in 1940 to honor the academy’s founder and second president, Charles Homer Haskins.

Originally published by Lisa Walenceus at newsinfo.nd.edu on April 16, 2010.

Political science professor wins awards for book on Plato’s dialogues

2010-02-26T10:07:00-05:00

“Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues” by Catherine Zuckert, Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, received three 2009 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Awards), including the top prize, the R.R. Hawkins Award. Presented by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the award was for the first time also given to an online publication, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews.

With the prestigious Hawkins Award, Zuckert’s book was recognized as the most outstanding professional, reference or scholarly work in 2009. “Plato’s Philosophers” also took the PROSE Award in Philosophy and the Award for Excellence in the Humanities. More than 400 books were submitted to the annual award program.

“I am pleased to see that the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers recognizes what her colleagues have long known — Catherine Zuckert is an extraordinary scholar, more than deserving of this triple honor,” says Michael Desch, chair of Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science. “Her most recent book ‘Plato’s Philosophers’ will not be her last major scholarly contribution, but it is certainly a milestone in her distinguished career.”

Published by the University of Chicago Press, “Plato’s Philosophers,” a 900-page volume that is the culmination of 12 years of research, writing and editing, takes on the difficult task of discerning Plato’s true ideas from the contradictory voices he used to express them.

“Most students of Plato now agree that it is necessary to read each of the dialogues as a whole, taking account of both the literary and the philosophical aspects,” Zuckert says. “But no one has shown how these little prose dramas go together to constitute a comprehensive view.”

That’s the purpose of her book, in which she proposes a new way of reading these imaginary conversations that organizes them by the dates Plato says they would have taken place, rather than speculations about when he wrote them.

“If we line the dialogues up in terms of their ‘dramatic dating,’” Zuckert says, “we see that the dialogues constitute a narrative. They tell the story of the rise, development and limitations of Socratic philosophy.”

Zuckert’s scholarly research focuses on the history of political philosophy and the relationship between literature and politics. Her book “Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form” won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for the best book written in philosophy and religion from the American Association of Publishers in 1990. “Understanding the Political Spirit: From Socrates to Nietzsche,” edited by Zuckert, received a Choice award as one of the best books published in political theory in 1989. She is in her fifth year as editor-in-chief of The Review of Politics, a quarterly journal established at Notre Dame in 1939 and, since 2006, published by Cambridge University Press.

The Association of American Publishers is the national trade association of the U.S. book publishing industry. Its more than 300 members include most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies.

Contact: Catherine Zuckert, 574-631-6623, zuckert.2@nd.edu

Originally published by Lisa Walenceus at newsinfo.nd.edu on February 26, 2010.