“When I watch the news I’m really concerned about social problems. And I’ve found that whatever the social ill may be, the answers are found in history,” says Camille Suarez, a senior history major in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters who will attend graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania next fall. Read More
Watch Professor Linda P-ski and Nancy Giles talk about how the United States lost the art of dress. The dress she's wearing is from the Vintage Fashion Library.
This segment aired on CBS Sunday Morning, May 19, 2013
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-57585174/dressing-down-a-culture-for-refusing-to-dress-up/ Read More
Notre Dame junior Kate Squiers wants to be a doctor—and knows that a broad-based liberal arts education can help her become a great one. Read More
Catherine Cangany can’t stop thinking about fakes. Luckily, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) doesn’t want her to stop. Cangany recently won an ACLS fellowship for her proposed research project “An Empire of Fakes: Counterfeit Goods in Eighteenth-Century America,” which will analyze counterfeit goods travelling around the Americas during the colonial period. Read More
Brad Gregory, professor of history and Dorothy G. Griffin Collegiate Chair at the University of Notre Dame, has been selected as the new director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS). He succeeds Vittorio Hösle, the institute’s founding director for the past five years and the Paul Kimball Professor of Arts and Letters in the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures and concurrent professor of philosophy and of political science. Read More
Notre Dame Professor of History Christopher Hamlin has been invited to study at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, N.J., for the 2013-14 academic year. While at the IAS, he plans to continue his research on the intersection of public health and economic policy in 19th century Ireland and Scotland. Read More
John Van Engen, Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, has won the 2013 Haskins Medal for his book, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages. The Haskins Medal is the highest award granted by the Medieval Academy of America, the main professional organization for medievalists. Read More
Kathleen Sprows Cummings, associate professor of American Studies, has been appointed director of the University of Notre Dame’s Charles and Margaret Hall Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. Announcing the appointment, John McGreevy, dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, praised Cummings as “one of the country’s most accomplished scholars of American Catholicism.” Read More
University of Notre Dame History Professor Thomas F.X. Noble has been chosen as president-elect of the American Society of Church History (ASCH) for 2013 and will become its president the following year. Read More
Deborah Tor, an assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of History, has recently been awarded fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, N.J., and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Both awards recognize her research on the reign of the Great Seljuq Dynasty in the Islamic heartlands. Read More
Hip-hop and boxing are not just entertainment for Notre Dame’s two new Moreau Academic Diversity Postdoctoral Fellows, Brian Su-Jen Chung and Jesse Costantino; they’re fertile ground for academic research.
Chung, in the American studies department, and Costantino, in English, joined the College of Arts and Letters in fall 2011 as part of a University effort to enhance cultural awareness and diversity within the campus community.
The program, supported by the offices of the president, provost, and college deans, was initiated last year with 11 new postdoctoral fellows representing a large cross-section of academic disciplines. During one-to two-year residencies, Moreau Fellows engage in research, teach classes, and mentor students.
“We’re operating in an increasingly global and diverse environment, and it’s important that we prepare our students for that experience,” explains Susan Ohmer, who has worked collaboratively with vice president and associate provost Don Pope–Davis on the University’s Diversity Advisory Committee. Concerning the Moreau Fellow applicants, Ohmer says, “We found that we have a very rich candidate pool, especially in departments where the disciplines focus on gender, race, and ethnicity.”
Chung, who received his Ph.D. in American culture at the University of Michigan, taught a course this fall titled Hip-hop is Dead! Race, Circulation, and the Global Block, which examines the subculture dance and music phenomenon hip-hop within the context of global politics, economics, and history.
“Like other forms of popular culture, hip-hop, specifically rap music, is a billion-dollar industry, and it’s used to sell all kinds of products,” says Chung. “It’s a mass- mediated expressive culture that shapes our social consciousness of race, gender, class, and sexuality… Students are drawn to the artistry of hip-hop culture and are eager to learn more about its history.”
Chung’s spring semester class, “Screening Asian Americans,” focuses on Asian American histories and experiences as seen through the lens of U.S. mass media.
Costantino’s interest in the intersections between class, race, and aesthetics in American culture led him to study boxing, the subject of his dissertation research, which he completed at the University of California, Berkeley. A specialist in 20th-century American literature and visual culture, Costantino this fall taught a course in Notre Dame’s Department of English called Violent Modernisms, which highlights social and political change in the works of selected American writers.
“What has been most gratifying about this course,” says Costantino, “is how readily the issues in these texts translate into present situations. For example, we recently spent a week discussing the Occupy (Wall Street) protests and the corresponding discourses of violence and ideology in media coverage of the events. Students show tremendous interest in how slippery a concept like violence can be.”
Chung and Costantino are the latest to join what has become a community of Moreau Fellows on Notre Dame’s campus.
Jessica Graham, a 2010 Moreau Fellow in Notre Dame’s Department of History, describes that community as a supportive blend of formal and informal ingredients: “Formally, Maura Ryan and the other associate deans have scheduled a series of lunch workshops to help in our professional development and career advancement. Informally, we support one another in various ways. We call each other for help on the minor questions (“How do I file an expense report?”) to the more urgent issues about career and life in general…It’s a great group; there exists a true sense that folks are willing to lend an ear, advice, or help in any way they can.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on December 19, 2011.
Congratulations to Brad Gregory and Jon coleman, recipients of the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Notre Dame senior history major Michael Johnson was one of just 10 undergraduates nationwide selected to receive the Gilder Lehrman History Scholars Award, which funded a five-week research trip to New York City this past summer.
The prestigious scholarship rewards exemplary undergraduate students with a passion for American history, says Daniel Graff, director of undergraduate studies in the Department of History.
“It is designed to reach out to them and give them an opportunity to engage in actual research at the Gilder Lehrman Institute in New York City and to meet leading American historians,” he says. “It’s a really nice honor for a very select group of undergraduate students.”
At the institute, Johnson networked with professors and museum curators, researched rare documents, wrote a paper, and even created a short documentary. The experience, he says, was both educational and inspiring.
“I learned a lot more about using primary sources,” he says. “We dealt with letters that people have never used before, so we had to find out who these people were—it was all our own original research.”
The theme of the summer program, Johnson says, was 1861, the first year of the Civil War. “My specific topic was the role of the home front in providing aid and relief to soldiers.”
Johnson says he is applying some of the research methodology he learned in New York as he completes his senior thesis about Irish nationalism in the United States. “I’m researching 19th century Philadelphia and an Irish nationalist movement called the Fenian Brotherhood, which tried to fight for the independence of Ireland by staging actions both in Ireland and in Canada,” he says.
“I’m also looking at whether this group was representative of the Irish American community in terms of becoming American while simultaneously trying to maintain a strong sense of Irish nationalism.”
Johnson, who is considering a career as a professional historian, says his interest in history dates back to middle school. “My U.S. history teacher was so passionate about the Civil War, and it was impossible not to fall in love with the subject,” he says. “I guess I’ve always been fascinated with understanding where people came from and what makes people the way they are.”
As a student in the College of Arts and Letters’ Department of History, Johnson says he has continued to explore these kinds of questions while honing the practical skills he will need after graduation.
“The history professors that I’ve gotten to work with have taught me a lot of different tools that are going to be useful in terms of reading effectively, finding arguments, polishing my writing, and improving my research.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on April 10, 2012.
Jordyn Smith, History ’13, has been awarded the 2012 Frazier Thompson Scholar Award, given each year by the Black Alumni of Notre Dame to at least two rising seniors who have demonstrated academic excellence, service, and leadership in the greater African American and Notre Dame Communities. The award is named in honor of the first African American graduate of Notre Dame, Frazier Thompson, who graduated in 1947.