Paris, the legendary City of Lights, is the newest destination for University of Notre Dame students who want to study abroad.

“We are delighted to offer this new opportunity for students seeking to spend a full year or one semester in Paris beginning in 2013-14,” says , a professor of French in the . “The new exchange program at the will expand existing offerings by allowing advanced students in the humanities to enroll directly in courses with French students at one of the youngest and most dynamic universities in Paris.”

Founded in 2007, Université Paris Diderot enrolls 26,000 students at its campus on the banks of the Seine in southeastern Paris. This neighborhood near the Bibliothèque Nationale de France has a distinct identity all its own—many residents are ethnic Chinese refugees from the former French colony of French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) who speak Cantonese, Vietnamese and Khmer as well as French.

Notre Dame students in the new Paris program will study in the university’s College of Letters, Arts and Cinema, which offers a broad variety of courses in French language, linguistics, literature, art history and film studies “from an excellent group of teacher-scholars whose profile compares well with ND faculty,” Douthwaite says. It may be possible to take courses in other fields as well.

Université Paris Diderot

The program is meant to complement, not replace, Notre Dame’s other study abroad opportunities in France, including an intensive social sciences track at in Paris and the University’s popular, long-standing program at the in Angers.

Most students in the Angers program study at an institute within the university that is designed specifically to serve the needs of foreign language learners. As such, the Angers program is particularly well-suited for second-year students with intermediate levels of French, Douthwaite says, while the new Paris program is tailored to more advanced language students.

“The broad variety of humanities course offerings makes Université Paris Diderot a ‘must’ for advanced-level French majors,” she says. “They will be able to attend a well-regarded French university and take classes with native speakers, all the while doing upper-level coursework that is recognized for the major and supplementary major in French.”

Paris has been a capital of high style, art, cuisine and culture since at least the 17th century and has welcomed many famous American writers, artists and performers over the years, Douthwaite notes. With hundreds of museums, libraries, archives and world-famous monuments—as well as the premier sites of French government, education and finance—the city has much to offer advanced students seeking fluency, cultural immersion and intensive research opportunities.

The deadline to apply for study abroad programs is Nov. 15 (Thursday).

Contact: Julia Douthwaite, jdouthwa@nd.edu

Originally published by Kate Cohorst at on Nov. 6, 2012.

University of Notre Dame historian has been awarded the inaugural for his latest book, “.”

Presented by Indiana Wesleyan University’s (JWHC), the prize recognizes a published book’s ability to reflect the highest ideals of Christian scholarship.

“Gregory’s wide-ranging and synthetic study is a model of Christian scholarship that challenges reductionist tendencies among historians and illuminates the character and genealogies of some of the fundamental dysfunctions of contemporary society,” says David Riggs, JWHC executive director.

“As the inaugural recipient of the Aldersgate Prize, ‘The Unintended Reformation’ has set an extremely high standard for the future years.”

Gregory, the Dorothy G. Griffin Collegiate Chair in Early Modern European History, says he was delighted by the honor.

“I am sure that there were many other worthy books from among the approximately 80 nominated, which makes me all the more grateful to have ‘The Unintended Reformation’ singled out in this way,” he says. “It is gratifying to have colleagues recognize the achievement of a book that is ambitiously revisionist, challenging and provocative.”

Gregory’s research traces the relationships among religion, science, politics, morality, capitalism and consumerism, and higher education from the Middle Ages through the Reformation era to the present.

“Because 16th- and 17th-century Christians could not agree about what was true, right and good, modern individuals were eventually permitted to determine these things for themselves,” Gregory says. “And as long as most people still continued to agree about basic moral views and political assumptions despite their religious differences, such politically protected individual freedoms could contribute positively to the robust functioning of a democratic society.”

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

In notifying Gregory of his award, Indiana Wesleyan University Provost David Wright said, “Our selection committee believes your book best ‘demonstrates how rigorous Christian thought is brought to bear on disciplinary or interdisciplinary forms of scholarly engagement.’ Our committee members noted their significant respect for both the breadth and the depth of the details defining your work.

“Summing up many of their perspectives, one member of the committee went so far as to remark that your work was ‘magisterial’ in nature.”

Gregory will receive a monetary prize, an engraved glass sculpture from Kokomo Opalescent Glass, and the opportunity to offer the keynote address at the April 18, 2013, IWU Faith and Learning Luncheon.

Originally published by Kate Cohorst at on Oct. 3, 2012.

University of Notre Dame Assistant Professor has won the 2012 Leon D. Epstein prize for “” (Cambridge University Press).

The book examines the strategies behind decisions on whether and how to penalize members of the former authoritarian regimes in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as they transitioned to democracy, as well as the origins of the political parties that emerged in those newly democratic countries.

This is the second win in two years for Nalepa. “Skeletons in the Closet” also won the 2011 Best Book Award from the APSA’s Comparative Democratization section.

Presented by the APSA’s Political Organizations and Parties section, the Epstein award honors a book published in the last two calendar years that makes an outstanding contribution to research and scholarship on political organizations and parties.

“The sheer size and scope of Nalepa’s research design stood out from the very beginning of the evaluation process,” says Mark Brewer, chairman of the prize committee and associate professor of political science at the University of Maine.

“Our committee was even more impressed that she was able to actually carry out the project and produce such significant results. The word seminal was used more than once in our discussions of Nalepa’s important piece of work.”

Nalepa says she is honored — and inspired — by the success of her first book. “It is a great motivation to write my second book, but it has also encouraged me to bring my research to the classroom. I think if two different sections of the APSA think it is worth reading, it will stimulate good discussions.”

Nalepa, who was born in communist Poland and grew up there during the shift to democracy, says “Skeletons in the Closet” was her attempt to resolve a question that had long perplexed her — why Communist officials had been willing to negotiate peaceful transitions in most East European countries.

“Why would autocrats step down from power peacefully, when what awaits them is punishment?

“After a number of research trips to post-communist Europe,” she says, “I finally found a plausible solution, which is that members of the former opposition had actually collaborated with the Communists a lot more than was previously thought. The new leaders shied away from transitional justice because in the process of doing so, they could expose skeletons in their own closets. Because Communists knew that, they were willing to step down peacefully.”

In the book, Nalepa draws on archival evidence, statistical analysis and extensive interviews to support her argument. “I feel very fortunate that I was able to talk to some of the key players in the transition from communism while they were still alive,” she says.

After just completing a yearlong fellowship as a visiting associate research scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics in Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson 91��Ƶ of Public and International Affairs, Nalepa says she is eager to return to the classroom at Notre Dame.

“This is going to be a great opportunity to actually incorporate the book into my teaching,” says Nalepa, who will teach an Introduction to Comparative Politics class for first-year students in the fall and a similar course for upper-level students in the spring.

The course, she says, will focus on the political forces at work in countries other than the United States, from post-Communist Europe to the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

“I want to increase the students’ awareness of puzzling events that call for answers in other countries around the world,” she says.

Nalepa is also at work on her next book project, which explores trends in legislative politics in post-communist Europe. “It is about how parties and party political organizations respond to changes in the electorate, how they conduct recruitment, how they set the policy agenda in response to that, and how they discipline their members.”

She is also interested in the origins of such parties and how formerly underground opposition groups and members of ousted authoritarian regimes organize and begin to compete for power in newly democratic countries.

“How do they transform themselves into viable, effective parties that are capable of ruling?”

College of Arts and Letters undergraduates will be able to play a role in her ongoing research, says Nalepa, who enlisted Notre Dame sophomore and native Polish speaker Julia Banasikowski to help code some of her survey data last spring.

“That experience has brought me to realize that I can I can incorporate working with students into my research and in doing so expose them to the challenges, but also rewards of academic research,” Nalepa says.

“I look forward to working with more students such as Julia after I return to campus in August.”

Originally published by Kate Cohorst at on July 24, 2012.

University of Notre Dame Professor and his team have been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to produce the first critical edition of a key work by medieval theologian and philosopher John Duns Scotus.

The three-year, $300,000 grant was one of the largest awarded by the NEH this year, according to Emery, a professor in the (PLS) in Notre Dame’s and the University’s .

Beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993, Scotus is “one of the most important of all medieval philosophers and theologians, on the same level with Thomas Aquinas,” Emery notes, adding that Scotus is perhaps best known for his work defending the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary against its many critics in the Middle Ages.

Scotus’ arguments about Mary, Emery says, “were crucial for the Church’s authorities to accept this as a teaching of the Catholic faith.”

In universities and in schools of religious orders, Peter Lombard’s “Sentences” was “the textbook for teaching theology from the 13th through the 16th centuries,” Emery says, “and anyone who wanted to get a doctorate in theology had to write a commentary on the questions it contained.”

Scotus first did so while at Oxford University, in a version known as the “Ordinatio,” which he continued to expand upon throughout his life. The Franciscans at the International Scotistic Commission in Rome have been working since 1950 to prepare a critical edition of the "Ordinatio"—and are still far from finished, Emery says.

“These works are huge, and they are many volumes,” he explains. “It’s become apparent they will never be able to do all of Duns Scotus’ other works, the most important of which were done after he left Oxford and was appointed to the University of Paris, which was the most prestigious of all theology faculties.

“So the Scotistic Commission in Rome agreed that all of the Parisian works, including his lectures on the “Sentences” that he gave there, should be done by our American team.”

The NEH grant establishes the Scotistic Commission of America at Notre Dame and helps fund its first major project on Scotus’ “Sentences” lectures in Paris.

Led by Emery and his co-director, Catholic University of America’s Timothy B. Noone, the editorial team includes four scholars from the Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters: Philosophy Professor ; PLS Assistant Professor ; and and , both Ph.D candidates from the Medieval Institute.

While Scotus’ Parisian lectures on the “Sentences” are largely unknown, they “represent his most mature, authoritative teaching,” Emery says.

To produce the first critical edition of this work, Emery and his team must gather and compare dozens of medieval manuscripts containing lecture notes written by Scotus and his students, analyze and translate them, and find and explain all of the references to the teachings of earlier scholars such as Aristotle and Augustine.

“This is a long and very patient work, but it’s at the center of medieval studies,” Emery says, “because everything in medieval studies is in handwritten books, and the ones that survived are scattered in libraries across the world.”

With its “unparalleled library in medieval studies” and a group of scholars who are experts on Scotus and the philosophy and theology of his time, Notre Dame is an ideal site for this work in the United States, he says, adding that it is particularly appropriate because the University’s founder, Father Sorin, “had a great piety to our Lady’s Immaculate Conception.”

Over the next three years, Emery and his team plan to complete Scotus’ lectures on the first of the four books in Lombard’s “Sentences” and a large part of another.

“We hope that we will be able to build on this and to continue to receive grants from the NEH to edit the rest, and also the other Parisian works of Duns Scotus,” Emery says. “We are envisioning a many-year project centered at Notre Dame in the Medieval Institute.”

Contact: Kent Emery Jr., 574-631-6110, Kent.Emery.1@nd.edu

Originally published by Kate Cohorst at on November 11, 2011.

It’s a timeless project—and a priceless opportunity: Advanced students at the University of Notre Dame are currently working with some of Italy’s top linguistics experts to assemble the most complete historical dictionary of the Italian language prior to 1375.

Notre Dame is currently the only university outside of Italy invited to to the (TLIO) project, an initiative of the prestigious Accademia della crusca’s Opera del vocabolario italiano (OVI) branch.

“It’s a kind of training that nobody else in the United States gets to do,” says , a post-doctoral research fellow who spent a year at the OVI in Florence as a Ph.D. student at Notre Dame and now manages the University’s involvement in the dictionary project.

“Through this kind of text-based, philological analysis you really do learn how to read Italian and think about the Italian language in a completely different way.”

“It is a very practical and direct way to get into Italian language and culture,” agrees , a TLIO researcher who received her master’s in Italian studies from Notre Dame last spring and is entering the new program this fall. “When you are studying each word you have to deal with the context in which it was used and also the things that it meant at that time, and it opens a broader horizon.”

Since the summer of 2008, students in the have written more than 100 dictionary entries. Although participants have primarily been graduate students, the project is open to faculty, postdoctoral fellows and advanced undergraduates as well.

“We’ve done a really interesting range, including some pretty important words for Italian culture, such as gondola, cupola, and prosciutto,” Leavitt says.

“Cantica,” he continues, “is a word that Dante uses to refer to different sections of the ‘Divine Comedy,’ and there are studies done just on where is he getting this word and why he’s using it because it’s a strange one that you wouldn’t expect.

“And we did the entry here for cantica—we went far beyond Dante to give a more complete definition.”

Drudi and the other Notre Dame participants are each assigned a specific list of words and given a variety of relevant text excerpts, mainly from the 11th and 12th centuries. They then try to discern the definition based on how the word is used in those contexts, Leavitt says.

Each entry includes etymology, first documented use, primary and alternate definitions, examples of phrases in which the word might have a different meaning, and the geographic distribution of the word over time—which is of particular interest in Italian because there were wide regional disparities as the language developed.

“Then there is a section called linguistic notes, where you really get to see some of the creativity and the ability of the people actually writing entries,” Leavitt says.

, who received his master’s in Italian studies last spring, participated in the TLIO project during each of the past two summers.

“It’s a very interesting program to develop our proficiency,” he says. “You have the opportunity, first of all, to publish something, as entries can count as a publication. Also, you can work with people from whom you can learn a great deal. It’s a very pedagogical project.

“It is also one of those exclusive resources which are available at Notre Dame—and one of the reasons why I decided to go on with my Ph.D. here in medieval studies,” he adds.

Another, more unexpected benefit, say both Drudi and Gianferrari, has been exposure to texts they would not otherwise have read.

“Very often you just study the most famous texts or those texts that were elected by the critics, but there are many others,” he says. “And it’s important for a scholar to develop a knowledge of the wide range of texts that constitute a culture.”

The OVI collaboration has proven to be valuable across the curriculum at Notre Dame, Leavitt says.

“[Associate Professional Specialist] Giovanna Lenzi-Sandusky has said that she was able to share some of her work on the dictionary with her students in first- and second-year language courses, and to get them excited about the growth and change of the Italian language over time,” he says. “Elizabeth Simari [a 2008 Notre Dame graduate], who began work on the OVI the summer after her graduation from Notre Dame with a bachelor’s in Italian, now lives and works in Italy; and James Kriesel [now assistant professor of Italian at Colby College] developed his interests in medieval philology into a dissertation on Boccaccio.”

Although still a work in progress, the free, online, searchable database Notre Dame is helping to create is also contributing to the work of scholars here and around the world. According to an article in the journal , those who have used the dictionary database in their research so far include a Renaissance musicologist, an economic historian at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and linguistic researchers, historians and scholars working on critical editions.

The opportunity for Notre Dame faculty and students to contribute to this valuable resource will be available for many years to come, Leavitt says. “I don’t know that there’s any kind of end date on it because it’s such a huge project.”

In fact, the University’s participation in the project is expected to grow along with its new interdisciplinary at Notre Dame program, which connects faculty and students from the Ph.D. in Literature program, the , the , and the departments of history, classics, theology, Romance languages and literatures, and art, art history and design.

“Italian 91��Ƶ at Notre Dame already has a strong reputation, but I think because it is a program that is also growing and changing very quickly it can take on a project like this,” Leavitt says.

“We anticipate many more participants in the OVI collaboration in the future.”

A new book by Pope Benedict XVI highlights University of Notre Dame biblical scholar ’s extensive research on the history of Jesus.

“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 pope writes in “Jesus of Nazareth,” volume two, “Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection.”

This is the second time Meier has been so honored. The pope also mentioned Meier’s work in the first volume of Jesus of Nazareth.

“The last time, in volume one, it was simply a gracious note in the back of the book,” said Meier, the William K. Warren Foundation Professor of Theology in the University’s College of Arts and Letters. “In volume two, he actually draws me into the book itself and says very complimentary things there as well.”

In his introduction to the new book, Pope Benedict calls Meier’s four published volumes of “A Marginal Jew”
“excellent” and “exhaustive.” The pope also mentions Meier’s research in the chapter about the Last Supper, in a note in the extended bibliography, and even in the glossary—where Meier was given his own entry.

Meier jokes that his glossary listing falls right between Maximus the Confessor, a Church Father and Byzantine theologian, and Melchizedek, the priest and king of Salem. “At least all three of us are, in some sense or other, priests according to the order of Melchizedek,” he said with a smile.

He said he first heard the news this spring, when the publisher offered him a chance to read proof pages of the book before it was published.

“I had no clue before then,” Meier said. “It was a very pleasant surprise.”

He was particularly pleased to be the only American the pope named among a handful of respected Catholic exegetes—many of whom Meier himself has studied and looked up to as his inspiration.

“Needless to say it was a great honor, on the one hand, just being acknowledged by the pope and, on the other hand, to be mentioned with them in a very small, selective list,” he said. “I felt extremely honored, extremely grateful to the pope for having done that.”

A New Testament scholar and priest of the Archdiocese of New York, Meier focuses his research on the quest for the historical Jesus—"that Jesus whom any serious scholar could try to reconstruct from the historical sources we have," he said.

His premise is to find those details, based purely on historical grounds, about which a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, a Muslim, and an agnostic could all agree.

“The historical Jesus is not the real Jesus,” Meier explained. “Historical Jesus is a very narrowly defined academic reconstruction which is not exactly the full reality of who he was or is. It is not going to include the whole dimension of faith that, say, either a believing Catholic or a believing Protestant would insist is the full reality.”

So far, Meier has published four volumes of “A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus,” which have been translated into Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish. He is currently working on the fifth and final volume.

Earlier volumes examined Jesus’ background and the chronology of his life, his core message and ministry, the influence of those who surrounded Jesus, and his teaching on and relationship to the Mosaic law.

“I purposely kept the most difficult problems, the true enigmas, for the end,” Meier said.

In the final volume, Meier will explore Jesus’ tendency to speak in riddles and parables and to refer to himself by unusual titles and phrases, such as “son of man.”

“Not only does he speak riddles and parables, but he’s making himself the ultimate riddle and parable of God by speaking in this strange, enigmatic way,” he said.

Meier is also attempting to tease apart which parables and titles can be attributed to historical Jesus and which may have come from the early church imitating his way of teaching and speaking.

Finally, the book will examine the historical circumstances that led up to and precipitated Jesus’ death—what Meier calls the “ultimate riddle.”

“There are endless historical questions there before you ever get into the properly theological mysteries of his death and resurrection,” he said.

Originally published by Kate Cohorst at on June 08, 2011.

, William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, has been appointed the 2011 at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Named for Queen Victoria Eugenia, the consort of Spanish King Alfonso XIII, the honor is awarded each year to a distinguished British professor in a different discipline. This year, the academic chair is in communications studies.

While Fernández-Armesto is best known as an historian, he also is an accomplished journalist whose work appears frequently in the national press in Spain and the U.K.

“I’m basing my [chair] lectures on the problem which I call ‘understanding misunderstanding,’” he says. “Why do we misunderstand each other so much? Why is it so hard to get people to grasp the message? Why in ordinary conversation do we understand each other so little? Why do international negotiations break down? Why, when people have heard the same ad or lecture or radio or television show, do they all give you different accounts of what it said?

“This is a fundamental problem,” he says, “but it’s never really been addressed as a topic of academic research.”

Fernández-Armesto, who teaches fall semesters at Notre Dame’s South Bend campus and spring semesters at the University’s , gave his first lecture in Madrid in January and will return to Spain to present additional talks during spring break and at the end of the semester.

He says the appointment holds special meaning for him because it is a part of Universidad Complutense de Madrid. “It was originally founded by Cardinal Cisneros, the early 16th century Spanish humanist and statesman,” he says, “and the very first academic paper I published was on Cardinal Cisneros, so it’s a great source of pleasure for me to go to the university he founded.”

Since that first paper, Fernández-Armesto has made his mark in a wide variety of subjects—publishing books that include “1492: The Year the World Began,” “Columbus on Himself,” “Millennium: A History of the Last 1,000 Years,” “So You Think You’re Human: A Brief History of Humankind,” “Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food,” and “Ideas That Changed the World.”

His research and teaching interests include Spanish history and the history of late medieval and early modern colonial societies, particularly cartography, maritime subjects, exploration and cultural exchanges. In recent years, he has made contributions to global history, understood as the study of genuinely global experiences, and to global environmental history.

“I’m very intellectually undisciplined,” he says. “I always work on lots of different things simultaneously, like a juggler with all the balls in the air.”

Among his current projects, Fernández-Armesto has accepted a grant from a Spanish foundation to write a history of the United States from a Hispanic perspective, and he is editing the 2010 Schouler Lectures, an endowed series of talks he presented at Johns Hopkins University on the subject of 18th century slave languages in the New World.

“I’m also researching cultural organisms,” he says. “How do you find a common frame of reference for describing the history of all societies and cultural organisms? What can the study of other primate societies—and other cultures belonging to animals more remotely connected with us—tell us about our own history? Can we find a common frame of reference in which we could write about the history of all cultural organisms?

“That’s a very important subject for Notre Dame,” he says, “because it’s a very important subject for the Church. It raises the fundamental question of what is unique about humans.”

Originally published by Kate Cohorst at on March 10, 2011.

Who are we? Why are we here? Why do we do what we do? What makes humans unique?

These are the universal questions at the heart of an ambitious new initiative led by University of Notre Dame anthropologist .

Funded by a $197,000 grant from the , the Human Natures Project is a two-year research effort that could pave the way for a much larger, long-term endeavor.

“The idea really is to find a path forward into a multidisciplinary conversation on human nature—and I want it to happen here at Notre Dame,” says Fuentes, the director of the University’s and a professor in the .

While many scholars explore the essence of human nature, they continue to do so within specific academic disciplines, Fuentes says.

“The problem is that people ask that question from all these different perspectives, and the perspectives almost never talk to each other,” he says. “So if you read it in theology, it’s going to tell you one thing. If you read it in biology, it’s going to tell you another thing. If you read it in psychology, it’s going to tell you another thing—and the same for philosophy and anthropology.”

Fuentes recalls the old Indian tale of the blind men and the elephant, where each man touches a separate part of the animal, leading them to dramatically different conclusions about the animal.

“Each one of them is actually describing something that’s real, but they have no idea of the whole big picture,” he says. “What I’m hoping is that there’s actually a big picture out there for human nature and that maybe by trying to get together and work in a cross-disciplinary context we can find it.”

Fuentes says his goals for the initial two-year project are to determine whether the disciplines share any common or overlapping definitions and methodologies that could be a starting point for conversation and to explore whether “there is something about human culture and its connection with human evolution that might be a nexus for us to look at this commonality.”

To help answer those questions, he will review relevant literature and then personally interview top human nature scholars within each of the different fields.

“I’m not only looking at what people actually published officially out in the academic world, but what do they really think? Is this worthwhile? Is there a way to do this?” Fuentes says. “I want to try to connect the published work with the personal ideas and philosophies of these individuals. I think one of the best ways to really get beyond the disciplinary boundaries is talking to the people who are actually doing this.”

In particular, Fuentes is interested in discussing the emerging theory of biocultural evolution. “The way it’s structured enables it—I think—to be the place where theology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology and biology can engage in real discussions that move us forward in an understanding of what human nature or natures might be,” he says.

In the first year, Fuentes will conduct the interviews, form a team of graduate and undergraduate students to help gather information, and develop an interdisciplinary working group of Notre Dame faculty members. The second year will be for analysis, publishing and organizing a conference tentatively set for May 2013.

Fuentes also plans to create a website similar to “,” which is a project of the National Humanities Center. “It would be a virtual center for the study of human nature, where academics and intellectuals get together to think big things and post ideas online where they are accessible to the public,” he says.

Calling this new research initiative “a huge, adventuresome project,” Fuentes says he is eager to see what he discovers over the next two years.

“I want to see if it looks like we have something,” he says. “And if we do, I want to expand this into an ongoing multi-year, multi-decade project housed at Notre Dame—because where else can you really think truly interdisciplinarily about human nature?”

Originally published by Kate Cohorst at on March 10, 2011.

Two University of Notre Dame professors—historian and theologian been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowships for 2011-12.

“It’s a big honor,” says Noble, chair of the and former director of the Medieval Institute in the College of Arts and Letters. “I’m very pleased to continue the line here at Notre Dame. We’ve done quite well with the NEH over the years.”

Notre Dame has been awarded between 1999 and 2011—more than any other university in the country. The University of Michigan has been second to Notre Dame with 35 NEH fellowships during that 12-year period, followed by Harvard University at 26, Princeton University at 22, and the University of California, Berkeley, at 19.

NEH fellowships support advanced research that contributes to scholarly knowledge or to the general public’s understanding of the humanities. Recipients usually produce articles, monographs on specialized subjects, books on broad topics, archaeological site reports, translations, editions, or other scholarly tools.

A New Take on Rome

���Dz�����’s NEH fellowship is for a book called “Rome in the Medieval Imagination,” which will explore how medieval people thought about Rome.

“My book should be of value to medievalists of every kind because every medievalist encounters Rome, but no one has had a guidebook for those encounters,” Noble says. “There’s really no book that someone can take off the shelf and say, ‘What did medieval people actually think about Rome? What did Rome mean to them? What valence did it possess?’”

The book is not a history of Rome, but is meant to provide insights on the medieval people who expressed such varying opinions about it, Noble says. “I’m actually not interested particularly in whether anybody was right or wrong but in why they said the things they did.”

Noble has been writing about late antique and medieval Rome for more than 30 years. His research has focused on Carolingian history, medieval Rome, the popes, the papacy, papal relations with Byzantium, and controversies over religious art.

He has been awarded two previous NEH fellowships—one in 1980 to work on “The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State” and another in 1993 when he began the research for his book “Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians.”

NEH fellowships are a strong affirmation, Noble says. “It’s a kind of an early signal that you’re onto something, that you’re doing something that your peers think is worthwhile.”

Ancient Insights

Ulrich, Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of , is one of the world’s leading scholars of the , a collection of ancient texts discovered after World War II in caves along the shore of the Dead Sea near Jerusalem.

“The biblical scrolls are manuscripts in Hebrew that are 1,000 years older than any Hebrew texts we used to have, so they really take us back to the period of the composition of the text,” he says.

������������’s NEH fellowship is for “The Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” a follow-up to his 2010 book, “The Biblical Qumran Scrolls: Transcriptions and Textual Variants”—a collection of all the texts in the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls.

“This new book will be a synthetic view that pulls together in a systematic fashion all the surprising learnings these scrolls have taught us—what we now know about the Bible that we didn’t 60 years ago,” he says. “There was great pluriformity in the biblical texts in antiquity, but we inherited only one form of it. Now we are seeing many of the other forms.”

Ulrich has spent virtually his entire academic career editing and studying the Dead Sea Scrolls—arguably the greatest archeological find of the 20th century. In 1977, he received an NEH fellowship to publish his first Dead Sea Scroll, the Book of Samuel. Between 1986 and 2006, Ulrich says he received “almost continuous” NEH funding as part of the official Dead Sea Scrolls translation team.

He is one of the three general editors of the Scrolls International Publication Project, chief editor of the Biblical Scrolls, and a member of the editorial board for Oxford’s “Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Ulrich, who co-authored “The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible,” is also a member of the translation teams of both the “New Revised Standard Version” of the Bible and the “New American Bible.”

Originally published by Kate Cohorst at on January 26, 2011.

University of Notre Dame psychologist recently began work on a five-year study that will contribute to revolutionizing the way personality disorders are diagnosed and further cement Clark’s standing as one of the world’s preeminent research psychologists.

The study, funded through a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, will expand on Clark’s previous work establishing a trait-based approach to diagnose personality disorders. The research will be conducted in partnership with Oaklawn Psychiatric Center, a local nonprofit mental health agency.

“Diagnosis is the first step toward treatment,” says Clark, William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Professor of Psychology at Notre Dame. “If we can figure out the components of personality disorder, then it should be easier to figure out how we can develop treatments that will address these different components.”

Clark the faculty this fall, after 17 years at the University of Iowa. She recently also was voted president-elect of the Society for Research in Psychopathology.

Her personality research started in graduate school and coincided with the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 3rd edition (DSM). For the first time, the DSM—considered the “bible” for making psychiatric diagnoses—switched to a criteria-based approach to diagnose all mental disorders, and additionally highlighted personality disorder as requiring separate attention.

But despite this advance, Clark believed that applying the same model to diagnosing personality and other disorders was a mistake, so she set out to find a better method.

“Our personalities are a complex combination of personality traits, attitudes, preferences, and so on,” Clark says. “It’s necessary to measure the whole domain of personality traits in the abnormal range, not just to have a few criteria.”

After 12 years of research, she published the Schedule for Non–adaptive and Adaptive Personality, or SNAP, a now widely used test that assesses disorders by measuring personality traits across the normal-abnormal spectrum.

“It’s proven to be a pretty good measure of personality traits in abnormal range,” Clark says. “But it’s not perfect. Now we need figure out what other traits are necessary.”

Her latest research will expand on the SNAP project, looking at what other traits should be measured. It also will study functioning—or why some people with extreme personality traits are adjusted and able to function well in society, while others are not.

The first two phases of the project include data gathering from patients at Oaklawn and from their adult friends and family. The last phase will be a preliminary test of how the assessment tool might work in a clinical setting, with physicians and psychologists invited to refer patients to the study. Clark and her collaborators will diagnose the patients and provide clinicians with the information, then follow up six months later to find out how useful it was.

Clark’s collaborators at Notre Dame are , Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor of Psychology, and , John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Associate Professor of Psychology. Also working on the project are postdoctoral associate Eunyoe Ro, project coordinator Laura Gumbiner, and a number of graduate students.

Clark also is currently one of 11 members of the work group revising the Personality and Personality Disorders section of the DSM-5, which is due out in 2013. The group is proposing that the DSM switch the way personality disorders are diagnosed to a trait-based system. While the DSM-5 will use the existing system, Clark is hopeful her research will provide the information needed to make the change in the next revision.

Such a switch would be a validation of her lifetime of work. “The switch the DSM is making is very exciting for me,” she says. “What distinguishes my work over my career is that from the beginning, I said ‘We have to find a better way to do it.’”

Originally published by Sara Burnett at on January 20, 2011.

A new initiative in the is uniting faculty from across the University of Notre Dame who study various aspects of the mind’s connection to the brain.

Assistant Professors and — who both joined the department last year — created the group called Conversations on Brain, Mind and Behavior as a platform for faculty to share ideas in their various areas of expertise and to inspire new research collaborations.

“We are grounded in biopsychology and neuroscience, but we didn’t even know faculty in other fields who are also interested in brain and mind,” Wirth says. “So we wanted to create a group where faculty could get together to read papers, have discussions, and bring in some outside speakers who do things related to brain and mind.”

The goal is to be “as far-reaching as possible,” Payne says, “and to bring people together who normally wouldn’t get a chance to dialogue.”

The University is supporting the endeavor through a grant program for cross-college collaborations called the Provost’s Initiative on Building Intellectual Community. And building community is exactly what the new group is doing.

“Lately, we’ve been meeting about twice a month,” Wirth says. “We’ve had different members give informal presentations on their work, and we’ve had some lively discussions. Just meeting people and learning about what they do has been very rewarding.”

The meetings began in February 2010 with faculty from biology, anthropology and psychology. Faculty from philosophy and business are members now as well.

“It’s been exciting to see everyone come together. I’ve been so impressed to see the breadth of departmental representation,” says Sunny Boyd, director of graduate studies for the and associate vice president for for the University.

The group also has begun to invite select graduate students to its meetings, and Wirth anticipates expanding to include more graduate students over time. In the meanwhile, student interest in this topic has been growing, she says, as evidenced by a new organization called Society for Mind, Brain and Behavior, which aims to promote research and knowledge about the brain and for which Wirth and Payne serve as the faculty advisors.

“They’re coming to me in droves wanting to find out about careers,” Wirth says, “and wanting to get involved in research.”

Some research collaboration has already started, Payne says, and the growing interaction between faculty members may also lead to more cross-listing of classes between the Colleges. “We’re really trying to find a way to capitalize on the people that we have here,” she says.

Conversations on Brain, Mind and Behavior also is using its grant funding to invite outside experts to speak at Notre Dame this academic year. Barbara Bendlin, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin 91��Ƶ of Medicine and Public Health who studies the aging brain and Alzheimer’s disease, is presenting a lecture next semester while Emory University’s C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior Frans de Waal—whom Wirth calls one of the leading primatologists in the world—is in January.

“Without the Conversations on Brain, Mind and Behavior, we wouldn’t have had the funding and initiative to get him to come here,” she says.

Some of the longer-term goals of the group include more research projects and a colloquium series. “I think that there are many of us that are participating in these meetings,” Boyd says, “who also have a desire to see a neuroscience or a cognitive science program develop.”

The University of Notre Dame’s (CPR) has received a $1.3 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to promote research at the intersection of philosophy and theology.

The award is part of a four-year, $5.7 million initiative called “.” Researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and the Shalem Center in Jerusalem also are involved in the research project.

“My goal is to help change how philosophy of religion and systematic theology are done—to help them become more interdisciplinary and to help theologians and analytic philosophers of religion find productive ways to engage and benefit from each other’s work,” says , a professor of and CPR director.

As part of the project, CPR will offer course development grants, residential research and dissertation fellowships, and summer research funding for faculty and graduate students. The center also is sponsoring an annual lecture series at the American Academy of Religion, organizing a series of workshops, and creating discussion groups that will bring philosophers and theologians together to hear speakers and converse about topics related to analytical theology.

The theme for the 2011 workshop is “Divine Revelation: Meaning, Authority, and Canon.” Topics will include canon formation and questions about the nature and mode of divine revelation, the nature of scriptural authority, textual meaning and biblical interpretation.

Rea says the time is ripe for greater constructive engagement between the disciplines of philosophy and theology.

“In the 19th and early 20th centuries, currents in both philosophy and theology made both disciplines inhospitable to robust theorizing about the nature and attributes of God, and about the details of core religious doctrines,” he says. “But the discipline of philosophy has changed substantially over the past 50 years, becoming now fertile ground for such theorizing.”

The Center for Philosophy of Religion in Notre Dame’s promotes work on topics in the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, and encourages the development and exploration of specifically Christian and theistic philosophy.

The strives to be a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life’s biggest questions, ranging from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness and creativity.

, an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded a National Humanities Center Fellowship for work on her next book, “Richard Rolle and His Readers: Defining the Literary in the Fifteenth Century.” She is one of just 36 fellows selected to spend the 2010-11 academic year working at the North Carolina-based center.

“My year at the center allows me to devote my full attention to this project—and offers the opportunity to converse with other scholars in the humanities in different periods and disciplines who share my interests,” Zieman says.

Her current research focuses on various manuscripts of the works of the 14th century Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle, who wrote devotional treatises and biblical commentary in both Latin and English.

“My examination of the late medieval popularity of Rolle’s writings,” Zieman says, “seeks to place the proliferation of religious writing in the 15th century in dialogue with the canonization of Geoffrey Chaucer as a writer of imaginative fiction to talk about what we count as ‘literature’ and what function writing serves in different cultures.”

Zieman specializes in late medieval English literature and culture with particular interests in liturgical practices, definitions of literacy, and the construction of “literary” culture. She has published articles on Chaucer and the liturgical practices of women religious. Her 2008 book, “Singing the New Song: Literacy, Liturgy, and Literature in Late Medieval England,” explores the intersections of these issues in the late 14th century.

To continue research on her Richard Rolle project, Zieman also has been awarded a month-long fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., and a one-year fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, a private, nonprofit federation of 70 national scholarly organizations and a preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences.

The National Humanities Center is a leading independent institute for advanced study dedicated to the humanities. The center provides a national focus for the best work in the liberal arts, drawing attention to the enduring value of ancient and modern history, language and literature, ethical and moral reflection, artistic and cultural traditions, and critical thought in every area of humanistic investigation. By encouraging excellence in scholarship, the center seeks to ensure the continuing strength of the liberal arts and to affirm the importance of the humanities in American life.

University of Notre Dame alumnus Patrick Dupré Quigley’s latest project topped the iTunes classical charts when it was released in August. And for a brief time, the recording was even more popular in the iTunes all-genre category than superstar Lady Gaga’s “The Fame Monster.”

Quigley is the founding artistic director of , a Miami-based ensemble of professional singers that performs a variety of choral works, including classical, contemporary, sacred and secular.

The group’s self-released album— —is a new interpretation of the famous piece. Seraphic Fire and the Western Michigan University Chorale recorded it together in a little stone chapel, using only three instrumentalists instead of a full orchestra.

In a recent on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” Quigley says he got the idea for the intimate recording by examining the composer’s notes in the actual score.

“When we take a step back and look at the words that Monteverdi himself wrote in the print, we see that the word ‘optional’ is used a whole heck of a lot,” he says.

After graduating from Notre Dame in 2000, Quigley got his master’s degree in conducting from Yale University. He founded Seraphic Fire in 2002, when he was just 24. Two years later, Quigley became the youngest-ever recipient of the Robert Shaw Fellowship, which the National Endowment for the Arts and Chorus America give to one promising early-career conductor each year.

Seraphic Fire is known for its high-quality and exciting performances of Baroque and new music. The group appeared with international pop star Shakira, singing the opening Gregorian-style chant on her platinum-selling album, “Oral Fixation 2.” In addition to its international concerts, Seraphic Fire performs full seasons in several South Florida cities, including Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale.