News
Notre Dame Professor co-edits book on history of religion
Brad S. Gregory, Dorothy G. Griffin Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Notre Dame, has co-edited “Seeing Things Their Way,” a collection of essays that aims to bridge the gap between intellectual history and the history of religion.
Noting that while religious history and intellectual history both are dynamic fields of contemporary historical study, historians of ideas and of religion too often have paid little attention to one another’s work. The book’s editors and contributors urge intellectual historians to explore the religious dimensions of ideas and, at the same time, commend the methods of intellectual history.
Published by the University of Notre Dame Press, the book is co-edited by Alister Chapman, assistant professor of history at Westmont College, and John Coffey, professor of early modern history at the University of Leicester. Contributors include Anna Sapir Abulafia, Willem J. Van Asselt, David W. Bebbington, Howard Hotson, Richard A. Muller, and Notre Dame faculty members James E. Bradley and Mark A. Noll.
Gregory’s primary teaching and research interests concern the history of Christianity in late Medieval and early modern Europe, including Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and radical Protestantism, as well as the long-term effects of the Reformation era on subsequent Western history.
Gregory’s first book, “Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe,” published in 1999, received six book awards. In 2005 he was the inaugural winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, an award given to the outstanding mid-career humanities scholar in the United States.
Gregory earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain, his master’s degree from the University of Arizona and his doctorate from Princeton University.
Historian Meserve wins award for New Book
Margaret Meserve, Carl E. Koch Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, has won the American Historical Association’s Helen & Howard R. Marraro Prize, which recognizes the best book or article on Italy, for “Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought.”
The book, recently released by Harvard University Press, surveys how 15th-century 
historians and political commentators tried to explain the rise and fall of Islamic empires. Drawing on political oratory, diplomatic correspondence, crusade propaganda, and historical treatises, Meserve demonstrates how research into the origins of Islamic empires arose from and contributed to debates over the threat of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean. Her book offers insights into Renaissance humanist scholarship and the long-standing European debates about the relationship between Islam and Christianity.
Meserve, a member of the Notre Dame faculty since 2003, specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. She earned her bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard and both her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Warburg Institute of the University of London. She has published articles on anti-Turkish polemics in the Renaissance, European knowledge of Asia in the centuries after Marco Polo, and the printing of crusade propaganda and news reports from the Orient. Two volumes of her translation of the crusading Pope Pius II's autobiographical commentaries have been published by Harvard University Press.
History Department Number 1 in ACLS Fellowships
Over the last three years, Notre Dame’s Department of History has won more research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) than any other university in the country and, in fact, has accumulated 20 external 
fellowships over that time period, more than a dozen of which are from agencies used by the National Research Council (NRC) to assess the strength of humanities departments.
A federation of 70 national scholarly organizations, the ACLS is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences.
Ahead of all other Top 25 research universities, Notre Dame’s history department has earned six ACLS fellowships since 2005, compared with four for Brown University; three each for Harvard, Yale and Vanderbilt Universities; two each for Stanford, Princeton and Northwestern Universities; and one for Columbia University.
“I think my colleagues have been so successful because they bring an unusual combination of erudition, originality and ambition to their work,” said Thomas Noble, professor and chair of history and a past recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and Fulbright fellowships.
This year’s ACLS honorees are planning academic leaves to immerse themselves in their research.
John Van Engen, Notre Dame’s Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History, is working on a major reinterpretation of the intellectual and cultural life of 12th century Europe. He also is the recipient of a 2008 NEH research fellowship.
An associate professor of history, Alexander Martin is concluding a decade of research with a book titled “Enlightened Absolutism and Urban Modernity in Moscow, 1763-1881.”
“It deals with the efforts by the ruling elites of tsarist Russia to make Moscow a showcase for the type of authoritarian, Western-oriented modernization that they hoped to replicate throughout Russia,” Martin explained.
Gail Bederman, an associate professor of history who specializes in gender and sexuality in the U.S., is writing a two-volume history of the earliest public advocacy of contraception in Britain and the U.S.
“One of the striking things about the department’s fellowship record is that faculty who are studying diverse topics with different methodologies have won the awards,” said John McGreevy, I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters and former department chair. “And the pattern over the last few years with multiple ACLS awards per year has been extraordinary.”
One of the nation’s leading centers for historical study, Notre Dame’s history department is home to a faculty that has doubled in size over the last 15 years. Recently, its historians also have won numerous NEH fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, major grants from the Hoover Institution and Spencer, Mellon and Earhart Foundations, and a fellowship from the American Academy in Rome.
Books written with such support have garnered a number of awards, including the Bancroft Prize in American History and the American Historical Association’s James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History.
Pierpaolo Polzonetti, an assistant professor of liberal studies at Notre Dame, also received an ACLS fellowship this year, bringing to four the university’s total for 2008.
Other recent ACLS fellowship winners include Linda Przybyszewski, associate professor of history; Margaret Meserve, Carl E. Koch Assistant Professor of History; and Remie Constable, professor of history and acting director of the Medieval Institute.
John McGreevy Appointed Dean of the College of Arts and Letters
John T. McGreevy, departmental chair and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, has been appointed I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters by Notre Dame’s president, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., effective July 1. He succeeds Mark Roche, who is stepping down after 11 years as dean.
“Since returning to his alma mater a decade ago, John has been a valued voice on our campus, throughout higher education and in the Church,” Father Jenkins said. “He is held in the highest regard as a scholar and colleague here at Notre Dame and in the academy, and I am delighted that he has accepted our offer to lead Notre Dame’s largest and oldest college.”
McGreevy joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1997 after serving at Harvard University as the Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History and History and Literature. He has been chair of the Department of History at Notre Dame since 2002.
“John McGreevy is a talented and recognized scholar, gifted and award-winning teacher, and proven leader,” said Notre Dame Provost Thomas G. Burish. “He has an exceptional understanding of and commitment to achieving even greater academic excellence while also strengthening the distinctive Catholic identity and character of Notre Dame, and he is able to articulate this dual mission in clear and compelling terms. We are grateful and fortunate that he has agreed to serve as the next dean of the College of Arts and Letters.”
“I’m delighted to accept the position of dean of the College of Arts and Letters,” McGreevy said. “Notre Dame’s effort to at once become a preeminent research university, enhance an already strong reputation in undergraduate education and nurture a distinct religious identity is one of the most important experiments in American higher education, and I look forward to assisting this project from a new vantage point. I know firsthand that I’ll be working with a remarkable group of scholars and administrators in the college and across the university, and I’m eager to begin collaborating with them on projects that advance our common efforts.”
McGreevy earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Stanford University after graduating magna cum laude from Notre Dame in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in history. After his appointment to the Harvard faculty, he received a Lilly Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in humanities to teach at Valparaiso University in the 1992-93 academic year.
McGreevy is the author of two books. His first, “Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North,” was published in 1996 by University of Chicago Press and was awarded the John Gilmary Shea Prize for best book on Catholic history from the American Catholic Historical Association.
The second, titled “Catholicism and American Freedom: A History,” was published by W.W. Norton in 2003. It examines tensions and overlap between an American liberal tradition focused on individual autonomy and a more communal Catholicism. Washington Post syndicated columnist E.J. Dionne praised “Catholicism and American Freedom” as a “masterpiece that will be read eagerly not only for its insights into Catholic history but also for its rich understanding of American history.” The New York Times wrote that it is a “brilliant book, which brings historical analysis of religion in American culture to a new level of insight and importance.”
Most recently, McGreevy has examined the intersection of religion and politics in the United States since the 1960s, and he also is studying 19th century Jesuits and what they can reveal about religious controversy, the “Catholic revival” and the trans-Atlantic dimensions of American religion.
McGreevy has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Erasmus Institute at Notre Dame and the Louisville Institute, and he has published articles in scholarly journals, newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and journals of opinion such as the New Republic.
In the classroom, McGreevy also has been honored. At Harvard, where he taught courses on city and community in the United States, the Great Depression, religion in 20th century American culture, and history and literature, McGreevy received the John Clive Teaching Prize in 1994-95. He won a Kaneb Center Teaching Award in 2000 at Notre Dame, where he has taught on U.S. history from 1865 to the present, American nationalism, American political traditions, and the Department of History’s workshop course for entering majors. He has directed doctoral dissertations and has been especially committed to the history department’s senior thesis program.
McGreevy serves on the editorial boards of Notre Dame Press and the journals Religion and American Culture and Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques. He also has served the University for the past year on the Strategic Academic Planning Committee, a group of 15 administrators and faculty members that is evaluating transformative research proposals that will receive up to $10 million each in new funding.
Burish praised the search committee which recommended McGreevy.
“The search committee members worked tirelessly, selflessly and effectively to identify and recruit a strong field of finalists for the position,” he said. “They represented the University well, and were exceptional in every respect.”
Miscamble is Awarded the Truman Book Award
Father Miscamble's recent study of early cold war foreign policy has just received the Truman book award for the best book published within a two year period examining some aspect of the career of Harry S. Truman or American society during the Truman presidency. The award is administered by the Truman 
presidential library. The award citation reads: "The committee believes that Professor Miscamble's book will become a standard work on the origins of the Cold War. It directly challenges the argument held by some historians that Truman's actions as president represented sharp break with the diplomatic policies of his predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt, that he was reckless in his dealings with Stalin and the Soviet Union, and that he unnecessarily provoked the Soviet dictator and helped bring on the Cold War." >Read more
Having Coffee with Linda Przybyszewski
Associate Professor of History, Linda Przybyszewski, recently met with Kerry Temple
of Notre Dame Magazine for coffee and conversation. >Read more
Van Engen Gives Presidential Address
John Van Engen, Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History, presented the 2008 presidential address at the American Society for Church History in January. >Watch video lecture
Graduate Student Receives Bourses Jeanne Marandon
Sheila Nowinski has been awarded a Bourses Jeanne Marandon, a humanities fellowship for graduate students studying in France.
History Professors Earn NEH Awards
The National Endowment for the Humanities has granted 2008 NEH fellowhips to two History Deparment Faculty. Tom Kselman, Professor, was awarded a research fellowship for "Conversion and Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France." John Van Engen, Andrew V. Tackes Professor, received a research fellowship for "The Spirit of Twelfth-Century Europe: Reason and Revolt, Reading and Romance, in a World of Custom." NEH Fellowships support advanced research that contributes to scholarly knowledge or to the general public's understanding of the humanities. Read Additional Story >
Reflections and Football: A History Major's Look Back
Notre Dame Alum, John Carlson (07), recently sent a letter to Notre Dame 
Magazine on his time at Notre Dame and his last football season with the Fighting Irish. >Read complete Letter
Martin E. Sullivan Named Director of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery
Martin E. Sullivan (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, 1974) has been named the 
director of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery Effective April 28, 2008. >Read full Story.
Superior General of Jesuits selects Father James Grummer as an assistant
The Jesuits’ Father General, Adolfo Nicolás S.J., announced the names of his ten
Regional Assistants during the meeting of the General Congregation on Tuesday morning, February 12, 2008. Among the new assistants is an American, Fr. James Grummer (Ph.D. University of Notre Dame), who held the same position under the previous Father General, Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach.
The new counselors were chosen from lists of three names that each one of the world’s regions (called “Assistancies”) prepared for the superior general last week. The job of the assistants is to advise the leader of the order on matters dealing specifically with the Jesuits in their region. >Read Full Story
Historian publishes book on indigenous women in colonial Peru
By Shannon Chapla
Karen Graubart, associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, examines the roles played by indigenous women in the early years of Spanish colonization of Peru in a new book published by Stanford University Press.
In “With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550-1700,” Graubart discusses changes in the working lives of the women and how their identity as “Indians” as well as women was shaped in a multicultural society. The book examines how the early colonial period witnessed a dramatic upheaval in the women’s lives, from their utilization of colonial law to seek restitution, to their creation of urban dress styles that reflected their new positions as consumers and as producers under Spanish rule.
Graubart provides a thorough picture of this transformational period by using wills and other notarial and legal documents and analyzing migration from rural to urban areas.
A new member of the Notre Dame faculty, Graubart most recently was an assistant professor of history at Cornell University and served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Massachusetts. She currently is working on a study of inter-confessional and inter-ethnic relations between Seville, Spain, and Lima, Peru, in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Matthew Grow Receives Shaheen Award
Four doctoral candidates at the University of Notre Dame will receive 2007 Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Graduate School Awards at the school’s first commencement ceremony at 1 p.m. Saturday (May 19) in the DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts.
Named in honor of a Notre Dame alumnus and his wife, the award recognizes the top graduating doctoral degree recipients in the humanities, social sciences, science and engineering. Nominated by their departments, the Shaheen Award winners are chosen for their superior ability as exhibited by grades, research and publication records, fellowships, and other awards received during the course of study at Notre Dame, and teaching ability.>Read full story
Sabine MacCormack is Newest Faculty Member Elected to the AAAS
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected Sabine MacCormack, Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C. College of Arts and Letters Chair, to its distinguished membership. As a Class of 2007 Fellow she joins 203 newly elected members who are comprised of leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs. This years fellows include former Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., pianist Emanuel Ax, filmmaker Spike Lee, Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and former Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Fellows are nominated by current members through a highly competitive process that nominates individuals who “have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large.”
Founded in 1780 “…the Academy has convened the leading thinkers of the day, from diverse perspectives, to participate in projects and studies that advance the public good,” added Chief Executive Officer Leslie Berlowitz. “I am confident that this distinguished class of new Fellows will continue that tradition of cherishing knowledge and shaping the future.”
Noll Elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians
Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History Mark Noll has been elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. Since its inception in 1939, the Society's chief activity has been to identify and celebrate distinguished historical writing. Membership, by invitation only, is limited to 250 historians. Fellows are elected in recognition of the literary and scholarly distinction of their historical writing.
SHGAPE Establishes DeSantis Prize
The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) has honored Vincent P. DeSantis, Professor Emeritus of History, for his contributions to the field by establishing the Vincent P. DeSantis Prize.
SHGAPE will award this biennial prize in odd-numbered years to the author of the best book treating any aspect of U.S. history in the period 1865-1920. The award-winning book must be published during the two years preceding the year of the award, with eligibility restricted to scholars who have not previously published a book. The winner of the prize will receive a certificate and an honorarium.
Professor DeSantis, who celebrated his 90th birthday this past December, begins his 59th year at Notre Dame this fall teaching an undergraduate course titled: “US Presidents, FDR to Clinton.”
Historian Rodriguez awarded career enhancement fellowship
By: Kyle Chamberlin
Marc S. Rodriguez, assistant professor of history and concurrent assistant professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded a 2007 Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
5 professors earn NEH Awards; ND leads nation for past 8 years
By: Dennis Brown
Five University of Notre Dame faculty members have received research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for 2007, bringing to 29 the number of NEH fellowships awarded to Notre Dame in the past eight years, more than any other university in the nation.
Marc Rodriguez co-editor of new book on migration
Marc Rodriguez has co-edited, with Anthony Grafton of Princeton, a new book entitled Migration in History: Human Migration in Comparative Perspective . The book explores the nature and complexity of the movement of peoples, cultures, and ideas in historical context.
Historian to appear in History Channel documentary on the Holy Lance
By: Michael O. Garvey
Notre Dame scholar, Thomas F.X. Noble, director of the University's Medieval Institute, will be featured in a documentary film on the Holy Lance Thursday (Dec. 21) at 9 p.m. EST on the History Channel.
Historian MacCormack explores cultural impact of Spanish conquest of Peru in new book
By: Shannon Chapla & Kelly Roberts
Sabine G. MacCormack, Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Professor of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame, has published a new book that challenges long-held assumptions about the cultural impact of the Spanish conquest of Peru.
Read Full story>
Historian Father Miscamble reassesses the Cold War
by Michael O. Garvey
On April 23, 1945, 11 days after the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his successor, Harry S. Truman, met with Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, the foreign minister of the Soviet Union. According to one contemporary journalist, the meeting was remarkable for being the first time Molotov had ever “heard Missouri mule driver’s language.”
Historian Mark Noll receives National Humanities Medal in White House ceremony
Mark Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, received the National Humanities Medal today in an Oval Office ceremony hosted by President Bush and first lady Laura Bush.
The National Humanities Medal, inaugurated in 1997, honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens' engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans' access to important resources in the humanities. Up to 12 medals can be awarded each year.
History faculty win major fellowships
2006 has been a banner year for major fellowships awarded to Department of History faculty. Four members of the faculty have been recognized for their outstanding contributions to the discipline. Linda Przybyszewski, American legal and constitutional historian, received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) award for a study of religion and education in nineteenth-century Cincinnati. Early modern European historian Margaret Meserve won not only an ACLS and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), but also major awards from the American Academy in Rome (where she will be in residence 2006-2007) and the I Tatti center outside of Florence for her work on the printed book in early modern Italy; medieval historian Olivia Remie Constable nabbed an ACLS award and an NEH fellowship for her work on Christian-Jewish-Islamic relations in medieval Spain; and Russian historian Semion Lyandres won a major award from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he will be in residence 2006-2007, for his ongoing work on the Russian revolution of 1917.
Historian honored by Indiana Humanities Council
University of Notre Dame historian George M. Marsden was one of six scholars to receive the inaugural Indiana Humanities Award from the Indiana Humanities Council at a ceremony last month in Indianapolis.
One of the nation’s leading scholars of American religious history, Marsden is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History and the author or co-author of more than a dozen books on the history and present state of fundamentalism in America. His most recent book, “Jonathan Edwards: A Life,” garnered four national book prizes.
$10 million gift from History alumnus and family to enhance Arts & Letters and Science Honors Program
Alumnus John W. Glynn and his wife, Barbara, have made a $10 million gift to the University of Notre Dame to expand and fortify the joint honors program in the College of Arts and Letters and the College of Science.
The benefaction will establish the Glynn Family Honors Program, replacing the current Arts & Letters and Science Honors Program, which was established in 1983. Beginning with the fall 2007 semester, students accepted into the honors program will be known as Glynn Scholars.