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Three Notre Dame faculty named 2024 Guggenheim Fellows

2024-04-12T15:30:00-04:00

Barbara Montero, Gretchen Reydam-Schils and Roy Scranton

Three faculty members in the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters have been awarded 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships in recognition of their career achievements and exceptional research promise.

Barbara Montero, a professor of philosophy; Gretchen Reydams-Schils, a professor in the Program of Liberal 91��Ƶ; and Roy Scranton, an associate professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program and the Environmental Humanities Initiative, are among the 188 scholars, scientists and artists chosen from approximately 3,000 applicants for the fellowship. The Guggenheim Foundation awards these fellowships to outstanding scholars in order to add to the educational, literary, artistic and scientific power of the country.

“I am thrilled that three of our faculty members have joined the prestigious ranks of scholars who have had their research supported by the Guggenheim Foundation,” said Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters.

“This is a high honor and tremendous recognition of the ambitious, valuable scholarship that is being done by Arts and Letters faculty across our humanities disciplines.”

Guggenheim Foundation President Edward Hirsch said the fellows are meeting head-on the profound existential challenges facing humanity and are “generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture.”

Twenty-two Notre Dame faculty members have won Guggenheims in the past 24 years. Other recent awardees include English professor Joyelle McSweeney in 2022 and Pam Wojcik, the Andrew V. Tackes Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre and department chair, in 2020.

Montero’s project, “Things That Matter: Actual-World Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem,” explores what philosophy can tell us about ourselves and the world we live in. Her prior research has focused on two different notions of the body: as a physical or material basis of the mind and as a moving, breathing, flesh-and-blood instrument that people use when they run, walk, dance and play.

Reydams-Schils, who has concurrent appointments in classics, philosophy and theology, will seek to retrieve aspects of human perfection in antiquity — ancient times before the Middle Ages — that are empowering and relevant. Her project is titled “‘Becoming like God’: Perfection in Platonism and Stoicism (1c. BCE-2c. CE).”

Scranton — an essayist, novelist, literary critic and climate philosopher — will pursue a project about the survival of the planet. “Ethical Pessimism: Climate Change and the Limits of Narrative” is an attempt to reckon with global political failures, he said, and inject intellectual humility into the conversation.

Now in its 99th year, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 people, including 125 Nobel laureates and winners of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

The College of Arts and Letters’ Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts offers support to faculty across the arts, humanities and social sciences in applying for major national and international fellowships, including the Guggenheim.

“The Guggenheim Fellowship is a very highly prestigious honor that represents a major achievement for these faculty members,” said Josh Tychonievich, ISLA’s associate director for research development. “Only about 6 percent of applicants in a given year are awarded a fellowship. That three of these fellowships were awarded in Arts and Letters attests not only to our outstanding faculty but also to the strong research culture of the college.”

Medieval Institute to host Medieval Academy of America’s 99th meeting in mid-March

2024-03-13T12:59:00-04:00

More than 350 scholars of the Middle Ages will converge Thursday-Saturday (March 14-16) at the University of Notre Dame for the 99th meeting of The Medieval Academy of America, hosted by the University’s Medieval Institute.

The institute — the nation’s largest and most preeminent center for understanding the Middle Ages — is a fitting host, said Thomas E. Burman, the Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute, a Notre Dame professor of history and co-chair of the meeting organizing committee.

“We want to show off our great resources in medieval studies, particularly the Medieval Institute, to all our great visitors,” he said.

The conference’s three themes are “Mapping the Middle Ages,” “Bodies in Motion” and “Communities of Knowledge.”

The Middle Ages, roughly, is the 1,000-year period from A.D. 500 to 1500. While some scholars have singularly focused on Western Europe during that time, assistant director Megan J. Hall said the institute fosters a global focus.

Medieval studies are inherently interdisciplinary, Burman said, and scholars examine the period from a variety of fields, including history, languages, literature, philosophy, theology, art history and music.

While there is a lingering belief that the Middle Ages were a backward time, Burman said the era is responsible for many aspects of modernity, including universities.

Thomas E. Burman, the Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute and Notre Dame professor of history.

The Middle Ages, he said, offer a 1,000-year-long laboratory to study interactions of Jews, Christians and Muslims. And for Hall — whose research pertains to literature and women’s studies during the medieval era — the period yields information about women’s history and the roots of some stereotypes.

With four plenary lectures and 60 sessions over three days, presenters will share innovative scholarship and reframe perspectives on topics ranging from architecture to pandemics to surgical errors.

Notre Dame graduate students will take part in the meeting, both as academics presenting papers and as volunteers to help the event run smoothly.

“They’re already heavily involved with the MAA and are dedicated to developing their skill base,” Hall said.

A number of grants, awards and publication prizes will be presented at the meeting, and recently elected fellows will be inducted into the MAA, which is the largest organization in the country that promotes excellence in the field of medieval studies.

Throughout the three-day event, Hall said, Notre Dame representatives will provide genuine hospitality, showcase all of Notre Dame and invite scholars to return for future research.

In addition to formal academic presentations, attendees will be invited to use other University medieval resources and programming. There will be relevant pieces at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, the “Mapping the Middle Ages: Marking Time, Space, and Knowledge exhibit” in the Rare Books and Special Collections section of the Hesburgh Library, and a presentation of the cosmology of Hildegard of Bingen at the Digital Visualization Theater in Jordan Hall of Science.

The 99th meeting will conclude Saturday evening with an Irish dance social called a céilí.

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on March 12.

Arts and Letters faculty continue record NEH success, winning three fellowships and a major grant

2024-01-10T08:00:00-05:00

Three faculty members in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame have won National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowships, extending the University of Notre Dame’s record success with the federal agency committed to supporting original research and scholarship.

Shane Duarte, an associate professor of the practice in the Department of Philosophy; Mary Celeste Kearney, an associate professor of film, television and theater; and Stephen Ogden, the Tracey Family Associate Professor of Philosophy, are among the 82 scholars nationwide to be awarded the competitive fellowships, which were announced Tuesday.

Since 2000, Notre Dame faculty have won more NEH fellowships than any other university in the country.

Additionally, a pair of A&L scholars — Katie Bugyis, the Rev. John A. O’Brien Associate Professor in the Program of Liberal 91��Ƶ, and Margot Fassler, the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy Emerita — have won a significant, three-year NEH Humanities Initiatives at Colleges and Universities grant to develop a website and to teach medieval liturgy.

“I am delighted and proud that the NEH has again supported our faculty members’ relevant and interesting projects,” said Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. “These four awards highlight the quality of diverse academic research conducted by our experts in multiple fields as well as the excellent support provided by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts throughout the application process.”

A first-ever translation

Duarte will spend his fellowship editing, translating and annotating Francisco Suárez’s “Metaphysical Disputation 30” (DM 30), which is a core part of “The Metaphysical Disputations (DM),” published in Latin in 1597.

Suárez, a philosopher and theologian, composed DM to provide a grounding in metaphysics — the study of reality and existence — that’s needed to study revelation-based theology.

Shane Duarte

DM 30, Duarte said, is devoted to the nature of God insofar as He can be known by reason unaided by revelation. It’s interesting, in part, Duarte said, because Suárez was a professor of theology and most of his works were informed by revelation.

Duarte will be the first person to translate the treatise. The volume he plans to publish will include a substantial introduction, and in his translation, he’ll strive for a balance of readability and fidelity to the original text.

“Translation work is often treated as secondary, or of lesser value, but at the same time everyone working in the history of philosophy wishes that more texts were translated into English,” he said.

The translation could provide valuable insights to people who work on better-known philosophers such as René Descartes, Duarte said. Suárez was an important thinker whose views influenced even philosophers who saw themselves as breaking from the Aristotelian tradition of which he was a part.

While Duarte’s prior work focused on later thinkers, he became convinced that a greater familiarity with Suárez’s work would provide a better understanding of 17th-century European philosophy, as well as of life today.

“I tend to think contemporary philosophy benefits from an understanding of its own history, though not everyone in the field agrees,” he said. “For society? Well, I think intellectual traditions inform our understanding of the present, though again, not everyone agrees.”

When Duarte learned he had won an NEH fellowship, his initial reaction was disbelief.

“For someone like me,” he said, “who is neither tenured nor on the tenure track, winning an award like this is tremendously validating.”

Filling a scholarly void

Kearney, who is also a concurrent faculty member in gender studies and American studies, will examine portrayals of American teenage girlhood from the 1930s to the 1950s in her book project, tentatively titled “Designing and Redesigning the Junior Miss: The First Wave of U.S. Teen-Girl Entertainment.”

Mary Celeste Kearney

The idea for the project sparked when she was penning an entry about teen-centered shows for “The Encyclopedia of Television” and came across what may be the first short stories written about teen girls. These narratives, written by women, resist some of the stereotypes of teenage girlhood and were an important deviation from previous literature about female adolescence, Kearney said.

“Because these stories are episodic and the protagonists don’t age, they allowed girls to be girls rather than showing them becoming women,” she said.

When men subsequently adapted some of the stories for stage, film, radio and television, Kearney said, teen girl characters were altered to be more domestic and superficial in part because of prevailing identity politics, but also because of conventions and trends in performance and visual storytelling. Kearney explores both the continuities and discontinuities from those early stories, as well as in subsequent adaptations, in today’s teen girl entertainment culture.

“We can’t really make sense of what’s happening on the Disney Channel teen shows without understanding this early period,” she said. “When you focus on the past, you can begin to connect some dots.”

Part of that dot-connecting is researching representations of people of color in teen girl stories across mediums.

“Unbelievably, the first film to feature a Black teenage girl was not until 1968; the next one wasn’t until 1992,” Kearney said. “That’s how long whiteness has dominated this figure within popular American culture.”

There’s still much to be learned about the history of teen girls in entertainment. Because teen girls have long been devalued in U.S. society, Kearney said, there’s a dearth of archival material and research on the topic.

“The history of girl-centered entertainment is currently inadequate,” she wrote in her NEH proposal, “not only for understanding how the original designs of teen girlhood were produced and what they meant during that period, but also for comprehending the paradox of why the figure of the teen girl has both transformed over time and remained much the same.”

A novel interpretation of a classical theory

Ogden, whose research focuses on classical Islamic philosophy, will write the first book specifically about 11th-century Muslim philosopher Avicenna’s theory of intellect.

Avicenna, who was also a physician, theorized that there were two types of intellect — the human intellect and the active intellect. Avicenna’s theory posited that active intellect was a single, eternal intellect ultimately responsible for all human understanding and for the major metaphysical components of the Earth.

Stephen Ogden

“Oftentimes when you explain it to nonexperts, they say, ‘That sounds like God,’” Ogden said. “It’s similar to God, but in Avicenna’s system, it’s a lower, semi-divine substance or intellect. It’s an intermediary between God and humanity.”

In his book — tentatively titled “Avicenna on Intellect” — Ogden will defend his novel interpretation of Avicenna’s theory as well as historically contextualize the theory with respect to Avicenna’s ancient predecessors and to later critiques.

The book will be a fitting companion piece to Ogden’s 2022 book, “Averroes on Intellect: From Aristotelian Origins to Aquinas’s Critique,” which recently won the Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize.

Avicenna and Averroes, Ogden said, had two of the most important theories on intellect in classical Islamic philosophy, and they heavily influenced later Islamic, Christian and Jewish philosophical traditions.

Evaluating the philosophical and historical reasons that Avicenna and others held their views continues to be important, Ogden said, because it helps modern readers consider their own preconceptions and biases.

“I think there’s something valuable — I emphasize this with my students — in reading something that’s a thousand years old, 2,000 years old, or older,” he said. “A lot of things seem perfectly natural to our minds, given where we stand in history, but if read by an outsider a thousand years from now, they might not seem that obvious. We’ve gained much more empirical data, but philosophers and neuroscientists are still debating and exploring the nature of the human mind.”

Reinvigorating an underserved field

With support from their NEH grant, Fassler and Bugyis will develop a website to preserve knowledge about the ritual practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church and to provide instruction on how to locate, read and interpret the relevant primary sources.

The pair are liturgical historians who “see our field as underserved,” Fassler said.

Margot Fassler, left, and Katie Bugyis

“More scholars need to know about the medieval Latin liturgy than ever before,” she said, “and the goal of the website is to offer instruction in a field that has rarely been well-served by the academy.”

Resources such as digital libraries, catalogs, databases and thousands of medieval manuscripts have now been made available online. Knowing how to use and navigate those resources, though, can be cumbersome and complicated.

“There’s all this material out there, but how do you use it?” Fassler asked. “Our whole enterprise is based on the solving of problems, and on utilizing the skills of our worldwide network of scholars to join in making tutorials.”

Bugyis and Fassler’s plan evolved into an ambitious project — “Medieval Liturgy: Tutorials for Students, Teachers, and Researchers,” initially supported with a $100,000 seed grant from Notre Dame Research — that is encyclopedic in its scope and pedagogical in its goals.

Their new website, hosted by the Medieval Institute, will feature peer-reviewed teaching videos that will systematically walk people through how to access and work with sought-after information. Fassler and Bugyis are inviting interdisciplinary liturgical scholars from Notre Dame and around the world to share their expertise, which will make their website a dynamic and evolving resource.

Main website sections will include resources on the fundamental components of medieval liturgy — the arrangement of the Church year in its annual cycle; the performance of the hours of prayer that constituted the Divine Office in every monastic church and cathedral; and the celebration of Mass. Additional units will feature other liturgical rites, women’s rites and liturgical music.

Understanding the liturgy is essential to understanding the Middle Ages, Bugyis said, but fewer and fewer graduate programs are training students in the liturgy.

“Notre Dame is one of the last places doing it. There is an abundance of resources here,” she said. “We saw a real opportunity, given the strengths that we have, to draw on the expertise of faculty and graduate students to create something new and important.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on Jan. 10.

For Ashlee Bird, Native American video game designer, better representation on screen fosters brighter future

2023-11-28T08:00:00-05:00

In her undergraduate course Decolonizing Gaming, Ashlee Bird asks students to consider how video games teach players to behave within digital worlds, and to examine colonial narratives around violence, race, gender, sexuality and relationship to the land.

For decades, video game players have sat in front of TV and computer screens and used controllers and keyboards to kill Indigenous characters, regardless of their objective or importance to the story.

While horrifying, it’s not surprising to Ashlee Bird, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame. Indigenous characters have historically been represented throughout popular culture as a bloodthirsty enemy of the cowboy.

“Gaming has taught people that Natives in digital spaces are the bad guys, and that you should engage with them in that way, even if the game is telling you not to,” said Bird, who is Western Abenaki, an Indigenous people from the northeast region of what is now the United States and Canada.

Designers of the action-adventure game “Red Dead Redemption 2” even used mechanical safeguards to try to protect Indigenous characters integral to the storyline. But sometimes safeguards aren’t enough.

“People find work-arounds,” she said. “People will spend time to find ways to kill them.”

“They’re powerful. We need to care about what games are teaching us and what we’re putting into them.”

Fascinated by video games since her youth, Bird now rigorously researches them, teaches courses on them and creates games of her own. She thinks critically about who is or isn’t depicted in them, what they allow users to do and the impact they have on generations of players.

Because video games reflect and shape culture, Bird said, they are essential to study.

“They’re powerful,” she said. “We need to care about what games are teaching us and what we’re putting into them.”

‘A hostile place for women’

Each week, about 212 million people in the United States — 62 percent of all adults and 76 percent of youth — play video games. Seventy-one percent of players are white and 53 percent are male, according to a 2023 national survey.

That’s a lot of people exposed to racism and misogyny in video games, said Bird, whose dissertation at the University of California, Davis was titled “Representation and Reclamation: The History and Future of Natives in Gaming.”

One example of extreme digital racism and misogyny was “Custer’s Revenge,” a 1982 Atari game that was eventually discontinued. Players earned points based on how quickly they maneuvered Gen. Custer, a white male avatar, past flying arrows to rape an Indigenous woman avatar tied to a pole.

While representation in video games has improved, backlash to inclusivity has been fierce. Misogynists threatened women in the industry with death and rape during the Gamergate online harassment campaign in 2014-15.

“Women, as well as queer people and people of color, are able to find themselves more in games, but the community spaces around them aren’t any safer or any better,” Bird said. “Gaming can still be a really hostile place for women.”

Potential for good

“It was really meaningful to me. It was a world that felt safe, comfortable, and made me happy at that time in my life.”

As a young girl playing video games with her older cousins in Vermont, Bird was already noticing the importance of representation on screen. In the game “Turok,” the Indigenous character Tal’Set was a stereotype, but he resonated with players.

“I was still fascinated by him as a kid, and I think a lot of young kids were — Native or not,” she said. “He was cool; he was a time-traveling Native who fought robot dinosaurs.”

Bird was in high school when she realized the significance and power of video games. That’s when she became engrossed with “Mass Effect,” a science-fiction role-playing action game.

Ashlee Bird has designed two games, “One Small Step” and “Full of Birds,” that upend traditional colonial approaches.

“I couldn’t believe the world that had been created — all of these backstories and histories. I was still in the closet at that point, and it was the first time I had seen queer representation in a game,” she said. “It was really meaningful to me. It was a world that felt safe, comfortable, and made me happy at that time in my life.”

Today, Bird uses Native American studies and gaming theory to analyze video games while she plays them. Through “close gaming,” which is analogous to close reading, she studies the ways that designers intend for players to engage with games.

“It’s an intensive, nontraditional way of playing,” she said. “For me, a lot of it is trying to break the game. What won’t it let me do, and why? Or, why is it making me do this thing, or what happens if I do nothing?”

Video games have extraordinary potential for good, Bird said. In addition to containing incredible works of art — including drawings, music and writing — they can be educational.

“All of the parts of your brain that are necessary for learning and retention are firing when you’re playing a video game,” she said. “They're good for pattern recognition and spatial awareness, and even beyond that — social skills, sympathy and morality, and questions of ethics and decision-making.”

Small changes, big difference

In her course Decolonizing Gaming, Bird asks students to consider how video games teach players to behave within digital worlds and to examine colonial narratives around violence, race, gender, sexuality and relationship to the land.

Many video games, Bird said, are colonial in their structure and script. Players are able to collect seemingly infinite resources, and “winners” are often conquerors who gain control over land or money. And games that include Indigenous avatars often portray them as a “vanishing race” or “a people trapped in time.”

“Seeing yourself, someone like you, someone you can identify with or someone you want to be like is so powerful and important in terms of identity formation.”

Bird has designed two games, “One Small Step” and “Full of Birds,” that upend traditional colonial approaches. In her virtual worlds, there’s nothing to collect and no one to fight.

“One Small Step,” which is set in space, encourages players “to remember that one small step can leave one giant footprint,” and punishes them for behaving in ways that are inherently colonial.

And “Full of Birds” is an interactive Indigenous art gallery that invites exploration of sacred spaces through the work of Sarah Biscarra Dilley, a member of the Northern Chumash Tribe.

She’s now working on a book manuscript about why “Red Dead Redemption” is influential to her as a scholar, player and queer Indigenous woman and how it fits into the history of the American West and portrayals of Indigenous peoples.

Assistant professor Ashlee Bird talks with students Eric Silva, left, and Sam Ouhaj about Indigenous representation in games.

Bird likes playing “Red Dead Redemption” the “wrong” way. She and a friend meet in the action-adventure game not to seek revenge, get into a gunfight or hunt, but to ride horses, catch up and go on fun missions.

Bird also ROM hacked (altered elements of) “Super Mario Bros.” to show how small changes in the game can make big differences in representation. Her modifications included swapping out the Mario character for Wabanaki culture hero Gluskabe, and replacing English with Abenaki, which is her heritage language.

Recently, a major video game company hired Bird as a consultant. While a nondisclosure agreement precludes her from sharing details, she’s excited about how discussions with company representatives could positively impact Indigenous representation in gaming.

Better representation in gaming, she said, makes for better futures in reality.

“Seeing yourself, someone like you, someone you can identify with or someone you want to be like is so powerful and important in terms of identity formation,” Bird said.

“Native people need to be able to see themselves in those spaces and feel like they matter and feel like they have a sense of power and possibility and futurity.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on Nov. 24.

Connor Kaufmann wins Fulbright to attend summer institute in Scotland

2023-07-26T16:10:00-04:00

Rising University of Notre Dame sophomore Connor Kaufmann has won a Fulbright U.K. Summer Institute award to attend a three-week academic and cultural program this month at the Glasgow 91��Ƶ of Art and the University of Strathclyde in Scotland.

The history major, member of the Glynn Family Honors Program and Latino 91��Ƶ Scholar in the Institute for Latino 91��Ƶ is one of just 39 college students from the United States to be selected for one of six summer institutes across the United Kingdom.

He learned via email that he’d won the award to attend the U.K. Summer Institute on the same day that he interviewed.

“I opened it expecting the worst and saw that I had been accepted,” he said. “I put my computer aside, jumped out of my chair and screamed, ‘Oh my gosh!’ before calling my dad to tell him the amazing news.”

At the Summer Institute on Technology, Innovation and Creativity, he’ll learn about Scotland’s development and the cultural roles of its institutions and museums, and he’ll get to explore the country known for its castles and dramatic landscapes.

Kaufmann, whose first name was inspired by a Scottish character in the movie “Highlander,” anticipates the experience will provide him with a fresh perspective about how he can better use his talents to help the world.

“I strongly felt that it would give me the opportunity to foster my creativity in a unique, robust and international way,” he said. “This would, in turn, give me the opportunity to best help my community’s immigration issues in creative and innovative ways.”

The resident of El Paso, Texas, has been a longtime advocate for immigrant rights.

Growing up, some of his friends who lived in Mexico were applying for U.S. citizenship and crossing the border to attend school in Texas. And while working at a migrant shelter during his senior year of high school, Kaufmann taught himself basic Portuguese so he could help Brazilian migrants arriving in El Paso.

“I remember trying to guide a few families to their sleeping quarters using my limited knowledge of Portuguese,” he said, “and their gratitude for my help has stuck with me forever.”

Kaufmann and the other selected undergraduates hail from 22 states and 33 universities; 27 have not previously traveled outside of North America, and 15 are the first in their family to attend college. The US-UK Fulbright Commission seeks to invest in people’s potential and seeks to remove obstacles to learning, understanding and collaboration.

Kaufmann’s selection was based on several factors, including academic excellence (3.7 minimum GPA), a focused application, extracurricular and community activities, ambassadorial skills and a plan to give back to his home country.

He credits his mother, now deceased, with encouraging him to dream big and to pursue those dreams.

“The lessons she taught me, and her belief in me, has and will continue to stay with me forever,” he said. “She inspired me to put myself out there.”

He set his sights on attending Notre Dame as a youth after learning his maternal grandfather had wanted to attend Notre Dame, but was drafted to serve in the Korean War.

Kaufmann is grateful for the myriad experiences he’s already had at Notre Dame; he said the Institute for Latino 91��Ƶ’ wilderness backpacking trip to Wyoming before his first semester got underway was a wonderful way to make friends who have become like family.

“When times were difficult during the school year, I relied on my peers in the Latino 91��Ƶ Scholars Program and the Institute for Latino 91��Ƶ to keep on pushing through,” he said. “My peers could and did rely on me, too, which created a beautiful support system between us all.”

Aside from his family and peers in the Latino 91��Ƶ Scholars Program, Kaufmann credits many first-year professors and the ILS administration including Luis Fraga, director; Paloma Garcia-Lopez, associate director; Karen Richman, director of undergraduate studies; and Maribel Rodriguez, administrative coordinator, for helping to make his transition to Notre Dame a smooth and enjoyable process.

Kaufmann plans to eventually attend law school and become an immigration attorney.

“History is an enormous passion and interest of mine,” he said, “and is perfect to begin forming the mindset I will need to utilize in law school, which is my dream.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on July 25.

Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism names new co-directors

2023-04-24T16:39:00-04:00

Kathleen Sprows Cummings

American studies and history professor Kathleen Sprows Cummings, who has led the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame for the past 11 years, will step down from the position in June, with historian Darren Dochuk and theologian David Lantigua becoming co-directors.

Cummings, the Rev. John A. O'Brien College Professor of History, has been associated with the center for nearly 30 years, starting when she arrived at the University as a doctoral student in history.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Cushwa Center in my academic life; it’s been larger than any other institution,” said Cummings, who served as its associate director from 2001 to 2012. “I planned just to stay a couple of years and move on to somewhere else, but it was just a great place to be.”

Cummings credits Cushwa founding director Jay P. Dolan as being instrumental in her development as a historian and scholar.

“I remember as a Ph.D. student saying to him that not enough had been written about women in the Catholic Church, and he said, ‘You’re right. You do it.’”

And that she has, including her 2009 book “New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholic Identity in the Progressive Era,” which won three Catholic Press Association Awards. She’s also written numerous journal articles and reviews centered on women and faith.

Cummings, who earned her doctorate in history, preparing to be hooded by Cushwa founding director Jay P. Dolan at Commencement in 1999.

Foregrounding the study of Catholic women — and women religious, in particular — was one of Cummings’ goals in her time as the William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Director. Since 2012, the center has hosted the Conference on the History of Women Religious, which helps historians to learn about and preserve the record of vowed women since the Middle Ages and to integrate their stories into larger narratives.

Under her leadership, Cushwa also established a grant program for scholars focusing on the study of Catholic women with support from a gift from Anita Tiberi McMahon. In 2015, Cummings convened “The Nun and the World: Catholic Sisters and the Second Vatican Council,” an international conference at Notre Dame’s London Global Gateway. And from 2020 to 2022, she led a project called “Gender, Sex, and Power: Towards a History of Clergy Sex Abuse in the U.S. Catholic Church,” which culminated in an in-person research symposium.

“Kathy’s expertise, dedication, and enthusiasm have strengthened the Cushwa Center in so many ways and meant a great deal to people around the country and world who study Catholicism,” said Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. “And now, I look forward to seeing how Darren and David will shepherd and advance the work being done at Cushwa.”

A marshaling of perspectives

Dochuk, the Andrew V. Tackes College Professor of History, and Lantigua, an associate professor in the Department of Theology, lauded Cummings’ vision and contributions and said they’re honored to continue Cushwa’s vitally important work.

Darren Dochuk

Dochuk’s expertise and experience includes U.S. religious history, energy and the environment.

“At all levels, from Rome to the grassroots, Catholics and the Catholic Church have sought to address social and environmental challenges wrought by energy dependencies through a marshaling of moral, theological and humanities perspectives,” said the co-executive editor of the journal Modern American History, which is currently based at Notre Dame.

“I look forward to helping place the Cushwa Center at the heart of those ongoing conversations, and to making the historical study of Catholicism and American religion — Cushwa’s forte — relevant for clearer understanding of current climate-related circumstances.”

Lantigua’s research focuses on Catholicism in the colonial history of the Americas and the theology and social thought of Pope Francis, the first Hispanic pope from the global South.

“By anchoring the study of American Catholicism in historical and theological inquiry, I hope to preserve and strengthen the center’s ongoing intellectual contribution to academia and the broader Church on critical issues of the past and present,” said Lantigua, who co-directs the Catholic social tradition minor and is a faculty fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International 91��Ƶ and the Institute for Latino 91��Ƶ.

David Lantigua

With Latin America as the most populous region of Catholicism in the world, and the growing demographic of U.S. Latino Catholics, Lantigua said the optics of American Catholicism are shifting in fascinating ways. He wants to make that reality visible.

“In addition to the U.S. Hispanic Catholic population, there are also ethnic traditions of American Catholicism among African/African American, Asian and Indigenous American populations, and their historical presence raises acute questions surrounding pluralism, racism and migration,” he said.

Dochuk welcomes the chance to connect Cushwa with other units on campus and centers beyond Notre Dame’s borders that are animated by similar questions about the nature of Catholicism and faith in the modern world — particularly along fresh lines of inquiry at the intersections of religion, energy, sustainability, social action and environment.

“This is a dizzying world of change,” said Dochuk. “I am excited to see the Cushwa Center operate as an anchor of sorts, with programming and the provision of historically grounded and faith-informed knowledge geared to a rich plethora of social interests and concerns, scholarly methods and spirits of action.”

‘An excellent trajectory’

The first four directors of Cushwa (from left, Timothy Matovina, R. Scott Appleby, Kathleen Cummings and Jay Dolan) at a 40th anniversary celebration for the center in 2015.

Throughout her time as director, Cummings has kept the center in the spotlight through her public commentary in a variety of media outlets. After Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013, Cummings provided insights and historical context on NBC and MSNBC, and then frequently offered on-air perspective as Pope Francis was elected and continued to make news.

The opening of Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway also catalyzed another of Cummings’ goals as Cushwa director: studying Catholicism around the world in order to better understand Catholicism in the U.S. In 2014, she and historian John McGreevy, then dean of the College of Arts and Letters and now the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost, coordinated “American Catholicism in a World Made Small,” the first seminar held at the site.

Next year, Cummings will be on sabbatical, continuing her research in Boston and Rome on the history of the clergy sex abuse scandal, and studying the history of Catholic sisters in Rome. The 2021 Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award winner also will develop a course on global Catholicism with the Rev. Paul Kollman, C.S.C., associate professor of theology.

In a letter she posted reflecting on her time at the center, Cummings thanks a number of people, including the three prior directors — Dolan, now-Keough 91��Ƶ of Global Affairs Dean R. Scott Appleby and now-Department of Theology Chair Timothy Matovina.

“I'm gratified to have been able to build on an excellent foundation,” she said, “and to have added my own stamp on Cushwa.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on April 19.

Africana studies professor Zach Sell wins Paul E. Lovejoy Prize

2023-03-27T13:26:00-04:00

Zach Sell’s book, “Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital,” has won the 2022 Paul E. Lovejoy Prize from the Journal of Global Slavery for its excellence and originality in a major work related to global slavery.

The panel of judges unanimously awarded the prize to the assistant professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Africana 91��Ƶ, describing his book as meticulously researched and beautifully written.

“I opened an email notifying me that I had won the award, jumped up and, in a moment of lucidity, celebrated very briefly with my partner,” said Sell, who learned of the honor while recuperating from an illness in Rhode Island. “Then I went back to sleep.”

Sell said it’s very personally meaningful that “Trouble of the World” — which details how slavery's influence survived emancipation and still infuses empire and capitalism — was recognized for making a contribution to the dynamic field.

His award-winning book evolved from research that he conducted for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sell initially focused on the movement of enslavers and overseers between the U.S. and the British imperial world.

As Sell did archival research abroad, he realized there was a deeper story — U.S. slavery intersected with British colonialism in Australia, Belize and India. And his focus shifted to histories of slavery, empire and capitalism beyond one nation.

“I saw a history of deep interrelation between the expansion of U.S. slavery and ultimate overthrowing of U.S. slavery on the one hand, and the transformation of the British imperial world, which has industrial capitalism at its core,” he said.

Sell’s book concludes with a chart from the 1852 book “The Future Wealth of America,” which estimated that more than 71 million Black people would be enslaved in the United States by the year 2000.

“This is a terrible, white-supremacist vision that slavery would continue forever,” he said. “While such a vision didn’t become realized, this doesn’t mean slavery’s legacies or afterlives disappeared with the formal end of slavery.”

Sell, who was previously a visiting assistant professor at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, has begun work on another book and is co-editing a special edition of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, titled “Subversion, Slavery and the Work of Empire,” about the histories of resistance to slavery. He’s also co-authoring a teaching primer for instructors interested in slavery’s history within a global perspective.

“The primer has offered me an opportunity to reflect more deeply on my own approaches to teaching the histories of slavery and freedom here at Notre Dame,” he said. “It’s been really important to work with Notre Dame students and be in dialogue with them about the history and legacies of slavery.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on March 21.

Anthropologist wins NEH fellowship to explore toll of climate change in Sierra Leone

2023-01-19T12:00:00-05:00

University of Notre Dame anthropologist Catherine “Cat” Bolten has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship to support the writing of her book that examines links between food insecurity, human population growth and wildlife depletion, land politics and degradation, and climate change in Sierra Leone.

The associate professor of anthropology and peace studies is one of 70 scholars — from among more than 1,030 applicants nationwide — to be awarded the competitive fellowships, which were announced Tuesday.

When she learned she had won the award, Bolten’s first reaction was disbelief, then giddiness.

“Finally, it settled into, ‘They believe in the project as much as I do,’” she said. “And that was a great feeling.”

Her award continues the University’s record success with the NEH, the federal agency that seeks to strengthen the republic by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying lessons of history to Americans. Since 2000, Arts and Letters faculty have earned more NEH fellowships than any other private university in the country.

“I am delighted to see one of our anthropology faculty receive this support from the NEH, especially for work in the environmental humanities, an area of research that is vital to our understanding of the present and hope for the future,” said Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. “I am thrilled and proud that Cat has continued our strong track record in earning NEH fellowships and grants across a wide range of disciplines.”

Bolten developed her NEH proposal with Josh Tychonievich, the research development program director in the college’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts. She also participated in an NEH writing group hosted by the institute, which provided faculty opportunities to work together on proposals and receive support and feedback from colleagues and staff.

A new way forward

Bolten was inspired to write the book while contemplating feedback from journal editors who rejected her article submissions generated through research from her work on the Tonkolili Chimpanzee Project in the West African nation of Sierra Leone. Each reviewer provided contradictory guidance and indicated they were unsure of which direction her multifaceted research should take.

A book, she decided, was the best way to make that all clear.

“After the third or fourth rejection, I was sitting on my couch, slightly paralyzed, not knowing what to do with this project,” said Bolten, who also is the director of doctoral studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace 91��Ƶ and a concurrent associate professor of Africana studies. “Suddenly, everything came together in my mind. I grabbed the nearest notepad, and in 12 minutes, I wrote the basic outline for the book.”

Within three days, she had an eight-page outline. And two months later, she had a book proposal. The book, Bolten’s third, is tentatively titled “Unknowing the World: Humans, Chimpanzees, and Climate Change in Sierra Leone.”

“Unknowing” refers to the paralysis and loss of sense of self that people feel when the wisdom of the ages fails them and they no longer have the capacity to create and invent to tackle pressing challenges.

“Essentially, we’ve reached a point where the speed of change is accelerating past the ability of generational knowledge to innovate,” she said.

Cascading effects

Bolten has been studying Sierra Leone for two decades, publishing more than a dozen articles and two books, “I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone” and “Serious Youth in Sierra Leone: An Ethnography of Generation and Globalization.”

Bolten in the Sierra Leone jungle.

Her research for the new book began with the Tonkolili Chimpanzee Project, which, in the midst of unprecedented deforestation, strives to conserve wild chimpanzees who raid farmers’ crops in order to survive. The project aims to stop farmers from hunting chimpanzees by reimbursing them for lost crops, and minimizing conflicts between people and chimpanzees.

“If you really dig down deep with people in Sierra Leone, they know that they need chimpanzees in their forest in order for the forest to be healthy,” said Bolten, who is also a faculty fellow of the Eck Institute for Global Health, Pulte Institute for Global Development and Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values. “They know this, but they can’t think about this every day when their kids are crying from hunger.”

Creating a sustainable future, Bolten said, is more than just trying to reverse the statistics on rising carbon dioxide levels and the number of species going extinct — and it’s about more than conserving one environment or one species. It involves asking real questions about what a livable world looks like.

“There’s often an instance of what I call the ‘politics of post-colonial blame,’ which is that it’s very easy to ignore long histories of colonialism when you’re looking at people struggling in their environments right now,” she said. “It’s easier to say, ‘Slash-and-burn agriculture is bad and that’s why your land is dying,’ rather than asking what much longer politics were involved in this.”

Bolten has been studying past politics in Sierra Leone’s long history — including its civil war, the exploitative commercial farming practices of British American Tobacco, the colonial railway built in the 1890s and myriad cascading effects — to learn about the impacts those forces and events have had on the present.

A livable future

These and other intertwined histories need to be understood if a livable future is possible, Bolten said.

It doesn’t mean trying to restore a fully natural, indigenous, conserved environment either, she said, noting that wild chimpanzees now frequently nest in a plantation tree from Indonesia that was introduced by the colonial government. And one of their primary food sources is the mango, which was introduced by the Portuguese. Another is a genetically engineered oil palm introduced through United Nations extension offices 90 years ago.

“We can’t ignore the fact that these trees have histories of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism attached to them,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean the chimps won’t nest in them or eat them.”

Bolten in the classroom with Notre Dame graduate students.

There is much to be learned from the chimpanzees, Bolten said, who have adapted faster and better to the degraded landscape than people. They’ve altered both their feeding and nesting practices to survive.

That’s not the case with humans.

“The villages look the same, the people act the same, they farm the same,” Bolten said. “They’re not able to ask themselves if a village should be here in this highly eroded area. Villages used to move all the time. It was a cycle of movement and adaptation. But now, humans feel stuck because the population has grown quickly. They have doubled down on maintaining villages they currently have, even as they are aware that they are draining the resources, and the land is never able to bounce back.”

For Bolten, the answers to these complicated challenges can only come through a multifaceted approach that both embraces and goes beyond science and social science.

“I always tell my students that the most important thing about research is learning to ask the right question,” she said. “That’s what I see happening so infrequently right now. I want people to ask better questions and find creative, non-disciplinarily isolated ways to answer them.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on Jan. 13.

In memoriam: Msgr. John P. Meier, professor emeritus of theology

2022-10-21T09:34:00-04:00

Monsignor John P. Meier, University of Notre Dame professor, Catholic priest and renowned biblical scholar, died Oct. 18 at age 80.

Father Meier, the William K. Warren Professor of Theology emeritus, published nearly 80 articles and 18 books during his distinguished career, including the acclaimed “A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus” series.

At the time of his death, he was working on volume six. The five completed volumes, published between 1991 and 2016, were translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and French.

Pope Benedict XVI heralded Father Meier’s exceptional scholarship in “Jesus of Nazareth,” volume two, “Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection.” The pope wrote, “From the immense quantity of literature on the dating of the Last Supper and of Jesus’ death, I would like to single out the treatment of the subject, outstanding both in its thoroughness and its accuracy, found in the first volume of John P. Meier’s book, 'A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus.’”

The Biblical Archaeology Society named the first volume the Best Book Relating to the New Testament, and the Academy of Parish Clergy named the second volume its Book of the Year.

Both the American Theological Association and American Council of Learned Societies awarded Father Meier full fellowships during his 2002 sabbatical, which he dedicated to writing volume four.

David Lincicum, associate professor of theology, said Meier’s epochal series was the most significant contribution to historical Jesus research of the past generation.

“He began that work with a famous thought experiment: What if four honest historians — a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew and an agnostic — locked themselves in the basement of the Harvard Divinity 91��Ƶ and couldn't come out until they had agreed on a set of assured facts about Jesus' life? By using a stringently formulated set of criteria to authenticate words and deeds of Jesus as historical, Meier examined the Jesus traditions in search of that set of assured results.

“Most consequentially, he approached Jesus of Nazareth as a Jew who lived in the first century, and so his historical work lent itself to interfaith understanding between Judaism and Christianity, two great religions who share the historical Jesus in common.”

Father Meier also co-authored “Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles of Catholic Christianity.” Experts consider the book — which the Catholic Press Association named Best Book of 1983 — a seminal work about early Christianity.

In addition to the historical Jesus and New Testament Christology, the biblical scholar’s academic interests included the Gospels of Matthew and John and Palestinian Judaism.

While Father Meier retired in 2018 from his 20-year career at Notre Dame, he continued to teach courses at the University and write.

“John was a beloved teacher and colleague,” said Lincicum, “with a reputation for wit and humor, and broad knowledge ranging from fine wine to 'Gossip Girl.' His death is an enormous loss to human knowledge.”

Gary Anderson, the Hesburgh Professor of Catholic Thought, recalled how Father Meier’s cultural literacy extended from the sublime to the ridiculous.

“He could speak about almost any opera and recite lines from them in their original languages (French, Italian, German). He never did so ostentatiously — it was just done in a sort of matter-of-fact way reflecting how deeply he loved them and knew them,” he said.

“He was equally attuned to modern movies, TV series and phone apps. He always amazed his undergraduate students with references to things they could not imagine he was familiar with.”

Father Meier, said Anderson, was also considerate of colleagues, happy to lead a life of material austerity, and modest — never one to put on airs or ruffle feathers.

Before joining Notre Dame’s Department of Theology in 1999, Father Meier taught for 12 years at St. Joseph’s Seminary and College in New York, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1964. And he taught for 14 years at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Born Aug. 8, 1942, in New York, Father Meier was ordained a Catholic priest in 1967 at the Altar of the Chair in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. And in 1995, Pope John Paul II made him a Monsignor — an Honorary Prelate of the Papal Household.

He earned a licentiate in theology, summa cum laude, with the gold medal awarded at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He also earned a doctorate in sacred scripture, summa cum laude, with the gold medal awarded at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome.

Father Meier served as president and trustee of the Catholic Biblical Association, as well as general editor of its The Catholic Biblical Quarterly. He also was on the editorial board of the international journal Dead Sea Discoveries.

A reception of the body and wake will be held from 10 to 11 a.m. Saturday (Oct. 22) at the Chapel of St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie, 201 Seminary Ave., Yonkers, New York. A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at 11 a.m. Oct. 22 at the seminary. Interment will be at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery, Hawthorne, New York.

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on Oct. 20.

Creative Writing Program director Joyelle McSweeney wins Guggenheim Fellowship

2022-04-14T16:00:00-04:00

Notre Dame Creative Writing Program director and poet Joyelle McSweeney has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of her creative ability in the arts and potential in future endeavors.

McSweeney, who is also a playwright, novelist, translator, critic and English professor, was selected as a fellow with 179 other scientists, scholars and artists from nearly 2,500 applicants. John and Olga Simon Guggenheim created the fellowships in 1925 to “add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country."

“I’m still taking it in, to be honest,” said McSweeney shortly after she learned about the fellowship. “It’s a spectacular show of confidence from the universe.”

Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation and a 1985 poetry fellow, said the work the foundation supports is the collective effort “to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.”

McSweeney is in good company: Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Ken Burns, Rachel Carson and Zora Neale Hurston are previous fellows. So, too, is Pamela Wojcik, a professor in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre, who was tapped in 2020.

McSweeney is the 19th faculty member in the College of Arts and Letters selected for a Guggenheim fellowship in the last 22 years.

“I’m thrilled that Joyelle has received one of the world’s most prestigious and competitive fellowships, continuing our tradition of excellence with these awards. It is a strong endorsement of the quality of her work and another signal of the growing stature of our creative writing program,” said Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O'Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters.

The Guggenheim is the latest significant honor this year for McSweeney, who has also recently won a Modern Language Association translation prize and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and had a poem published in The New York Times Magazine.

“Yi Sang: Selected Works” was translated from Korean and Japanese into English by Joyelle McSweeney and three collaborators.

In January, the MLA — which promotes the study and teaching of languages and literatures — presented the English professor and three of her collaborators with an award for their translation of “Yi Sang: Selected Works” from Korean and Japanese into English.

The MLA’s 17th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work was its first for a work of Korean literature. Avant-garde poet Kim Hye-kyŏng, who used the pen name Yi Sang, was fluent in Korean and Japanese. He wrote in the 1930s in Korea during the Japanese occupation and died in 1937 at age 27 after being imprisoned in Tokyo for thought crimes.

McSweeney worked with Jack Jung, visiting assistant professor of English at Davidson College; Sawako Nakayasu, assistant professor of literary arts at Brown University; and Don Mee Choi of Seattle, Washington, to translate poems, essays and short novels first published in Korean and Japanese, then “subjected to the hazards of war and neglect.”

McSweeney said it’s gratifying that through the translated book, Yi Sang’s “force is alive and moving around the planet and reaching people when they need it.”

“It feels right to be part of a collaborative multinational team that worked on this; it points to the flexibility and invention of his works,” she said. “It took four of us, a supergroup of poets and translators. We needed all these minds and brains and artists to get at his playful and subversive work.”

The selection committee said Yi Sang’s writing, which combines fable, fantasy, satire, parody, Dadaism, concrete poetry and quasi-translation, “presents a steep challenge to translation.” But each member of the translation team has “re-created in English Yi Sang’s terse, polyglot, self-undermining, dreamlike parables and essays. The elegant format and plural translating voices make this book a suitable monument to this intriguing figure.”

McSweeney said the endeavor reminded her that literature is not exclusively about “the finished text as an unchanging object that sits in its place in the official timeline.”

“It’s a whole process,” she said. “The world of art moves outward and moves through time periods. It’s thrilling to be part of the chain of reception.”

In March, the American Academy of Arts and Letters — an honors society that administers prizes, donates art to museums, funds musical theater performances and hosts talks — named McSweeney as the recipient of its Arts and Letters Award in Literature for exceptional accomplishment in any genre. She said she appreciates the academy's “encouragement to keep going” with her writing and its recognition of her distinctive work.

Depending on how you count, McSweeney said, her body of work includes eight or nine books of poetry, short stories, novels, essays, translations, verse plays and a book of criticism.

Toxicon and Arachne

Her previous honors include being named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for her double poetry collection, “Toxicon and Arachne.” McSweeney wrote the first part during the years leading up to the birth of her third daughter, Arachne, and wrote the second part in the spring following Arachne’s brief life and death. In February, the NYT Magazine featured McSweeney’s poem “Kingdom” from the collection.

Also in 2021, her poem “Post-NICU Villanelle,” winner of a 2021 Pushcart Prize, was published in the Iowa Review. She currently co-runs the translation press Action Books and is currently writing poems and a book of essays about poetry.

In 2021 and in 2014, McSweeney earned Notre Dame’s Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching “for her profound influence on undergraduate students through sustained exemplary teaching.” Peer and student nominations are part of the selection process.

She said it’s rewarding to help bring students into empowerment and see them unlock what they love about language. McSweeney structures class like a party.

“I’ll bring something, the students bring something, and we make something substantive together,” she said.

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on April 14.

Department of Theology receives Lilly Endowment grant to expand summer immersion programs

2021-12-17T15:30:00-05:00

The University of Notre Dame has been awarded nearly $1 million from Lilly Endowment Inc. to equip students in the Master of Divinity Program (M.Div.) and Master of Arts in Theology program to better serve in and learn from a diverse, ever-changing world.

The project, directed by the Department of Theology, is being funded through Lilly Endowment’s Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative. It is a three-phase initiative designed to help theological schools across the United States and Canada as they prioritize and respond to the most pressing challenges they face as they prepare pastoral leaders for Christian congregations both now and into the future.

While the Department of Theology already seeks to broaden students’ worldviews, there’s a clear call for ministers to have empathy and understanding of socio-cultural realities, said Todd Walatka, M.Div. director.

Todd Walatka

“The No. 1 thing that students need is the experience of cultural immersion connected to the ministry in the U.S. and abroad,” he said. “We are thrilled to continue to receive support from Lilly Endowment, which has enabled us to identify our greatest needs, build a pilot program and develop a transformative program that will help prepare pastoral leaders our Church needs now and in the future.”

The grant will support cultural immersion programs and Spanish proficiency courses for 13 to 18 lay and seminarian students, as well as opportunities to meet with and learn from peers at other colleges.

These elements were developed after listening to and talking with female, Latino, Hispanic and Black Catholic partners. Walatka said they shared a strong, coherent message — that future Church leaders must have intercultural competency and be able to effectively minister to people, including walking alongside them rather than dropping into communities with a hero mentality.

Timothy Matovina

“We learn from the wisdom of those in other cultures, from the struggles of marginalized persons,” said Timothy Matovina, professor and chair of the Department of Theology. “The Catholic social teaching of the preferential option for the poor does not mean just ‘serving’ the poor, but accompanying and encountering the poor as the privileged place where God speaks to humanity today.”

To help students become more effective pastoral leaders, the program also will include Spanish language classes and discussions with peers at other institutions.

Earlier this year, Notre Dame received a $50,000 planning grant from Lilly Endowment through the first phase of its Pathways initiative. The grant funded a pilot program of summer immersion placements for four students and a Spanish-language program for 25 students. Follow-up listening sessions with participants helped to inform the new expanded summer immersion program.

The project will continue to open the theological, cultural and pastoral imaginations of students and provide leaders that the Church and the world need.

Rebecca Ruvalcaba

“As members of the one body of Christ, we are called to walk, dialogue and work together to meet the needs of our diverse Church,” said Rebecca Ruvalcaba, director of pastoral formation for the M.Div. program. “This grant will allow partnerships to grow with colleagues and students from other universities, to grow together in understanding and appreciation of the richness of the pueblo de Dios (people of God).”

The $997,387, five-year project begins Jan. 1. It builds on the University’s commitment to serve a world greatly in need and to learn from the wisdom, faith and struggles of marginalized peoples through that engagement.

Notre Dame is one of 84 schools that are receiving a total of more than $82 million in grants through the second phase of the Pathways initiative. Together, the schools represent evangelical, mainline Protestant, nondenominational, Pentecostal, Roman Catholic and Black church and historic peace church traditions (e.g., Church of the Brethren, Mennonite, Quakers). Many schools also serve students and pastors from Black, Latino, Korean American, Chinese American and recent immigrant Christian communities.

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on Dec. 16.

Author Lauren Groff to give public lecture at Notre Dame

2021-11-12T12:00:00-05:00

Katie Bugyis

Lauren Groff’s bestselling historical novel “Matrix” captures a medieval world that University of Notre Dame Program of Liberal 91��Ƶ assistant professor Katie Bugyis has always imagined.

“It’s an extraordinary gift,” said Bugyis, a historian of Christian theology and liturgical practice who reconstructs the lived experiences of religious women in the Middle Ages. “She saw what has been in my mind and that I always hoped other people might see.”

Bugyis’ research on routines and rituals of medieval nuns might not seem like an obvious storyline for a National Book Award finalist, but it immediately garnered Groff’s attention.

It started two years ago, when Bugyis gave a lecture about Benedictine nuns in the Central Middle Ages as part of her fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Groff, also a fellow, was attending the lecture.

Groff’s two previous books — 2016’s “Fates and Furies” and 2018’s “Florida,” which were also National Book Award finalists — were modern stories set in America. But Bugyis’ descriptions of Benedictine nuns inspired Groff to envision an English abbey in the 12th and 13th centuries; it would be an ideal setting for a space nearly exclusively populated by women where they had agency and could thrive.

“My brain exploded into rainbows,” Groff said in a tweet last year, describing her moment of inspiration. It was there, she told the Harvard Gazette, that she thought “Oh my God, this is the next book.”

Inspiration and consultation

Lauren Groff

Groff met with Bugyis after the lecture, took notes at a seminar Bugyis held the next day for Radcliffe fellows, and invited her to dinner to ask more questions. Bugyis served as Groff’s historical consultant, offering a wealth of information about the topic and era and later reviewing a draft of the novel and providing feedback.

The end result is a 272-page tale of a historical figure, but one about whom little is known — 17-year-old orphan Marie de France, exiled by Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1158 to be a prioress at a frigid English abbey riddled with disease and hunger. On the novel’s acknowledgements page, Groff thanked Bugyis for her immense contributions to the work.

When Groff asked Bugyis what she’d like in return for her consultations, all Bugyis asked was for her to come to Notre Dame to give a public talk and work with students.

Groff is slated to do just that.

A day after the 72nd National Book Awards ceremony, she will deliver the Sister Kathleen Cannon, O.P., Distinguished Lecture at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 18 (Thursday) in the Patricia George Decio Theatre of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.

In addition to the public lecture and book reading, Groff will also spend significant time with Notre Dame students. She’ll give a workshop in the Creative Writing Program and offer a seminar for 15 Program of Liberal 91��Ƶ students on her novel and two of Marie de France's lais, “Laüstic” and “Chevrefoil.”

“It is my great hope that these events will allow students to talk with Lauren about her educational experiences at the undergraduate and graduate levels that formed her as a writer, her fascination with Marie de France and other great medieval women writers, her desire to create a fictional space in which women could exercise considerable agency and power together and largely separate from men, and so much more,” Bugyis said.

“Lauren possesses an extraordinarily capacious and generous intellect, and I know that she will encourage the talents and dreams of our students in countless ways.”

Groff said she’s utterly delighted to visit Notre Dame and that it will be the highlight of her autumn.

“I look forward to encountering all of the bright and thoughtful students in creative writing, medieval studies and the Program of Liberal 91��Ƶ,” Groff said in an email, “and to speaking once more with your own Dr. Katie Bugyis, whose brilliance and love for medieval nuns was the spark that made my love of Marie de France catch on fire and become a novel.”

‘An academic’s dream’

Lauren Groff's “Matrix” debuted at No. 5 on the New York Times bestsellers list in September and is a finalist for the National Book Award.

As a historian of medieval religious women, Bugyis’ work challenges prevailing narratives that nuns relied exclusively on priests for their sacramental care. She examines the rituals they created and orchestrated, how they heard confessions and pronounced absolution, and the levels of literacy they attained as readers, copyists, and composers of prayers and plays.

Her 2019 book, “The Care of Nuns: Benedictine Women’s Ministries in England during the Central Middle Ages,” won the American Society of Church History’s 2020 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize, which honors outstanding scholarship in the history of Christianity by a first-time author.

In the book, Bugyis reconstructs Benedictine nuns’ roles on the basis of the books they both produced and used. Bugyis’ talk at the Radcliffe Institute, for example, opened with the recent discovery of the remains of a nun who lived in the 11th or 12th century. Traces of precious blue pigment were discovered in the tartar on her teeth, which likely indicates that this nun placed paintbrushes in her mouth to wet the bristles when she was illuminating manuscripts for her community.

Details like this helped set the scene for “Matrix,” in which Marie de France defies patriarchal structures and seeks to transform the abbey and chart a bold course for the women whom she loves, leads and protects.

Groff explores ways that people could be human during that period, Bugyis said, including not following rules to the letter of the law.

“She doesn’t shy away from depicting a community that’s not perfect,” she said, “and that’s part of what it means to be human.”

Then and now, Bugyis said, society expects women to be agreeable and compliant, and she appreciates that Groff’s female characters may not be “likable.”

Bugyis said Groff’s gracious curiosity and ability to ask insightful questions made her feel truly seen as a scholar.

“It was an academic’s dream to have someone that interested,” said Bugyis, who also is a concurrent assistant professor of theology, affiliated faculty with the Gender 91��Ƶ Program, and a faculty fellow in the Medieval Institute and Nanovic Institute for European 91��Ƶ. “I’m a huge fan of her novels.”

So, too, is Barack Obama. The 44th president of the United States picked Groff’s “Fates and Furies” — a two-perspective portrait of a 24-year marriage — as his favorite book of 2015.

Reviewers also are lauding “Matrix.” USA Today described the novel as a “relentless exhibition of Groff’s freakish talent.” The Guardian said it “is a highly distinctive novel of great vigour and boldness … about leadership, ambition and enterprise, and about the communal life of individuals.”

The title of the novel, “Matrix,” which comes from the Latin “mater,” or mother, represents the foundational structure that gives rise to everything that was, is and will be, said Bugyis.

And that includes imagining a better future.

“Daring to imagine things differently feels liberating,” she said. “Lauren gives us permission to keep imagining.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on Nov. 9.