At a recent University of Notre Dame reunion, Rev. Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C., ’99, reconnected with old friends and shared stories of his life today, highlighting how he builds relationships with students, both in the classroom and as a priest in residence at Stanford Hall.

“You’re living the dream,” one of his friends said.

Koeth was struck by just how true that statement was. Since he first encountered the Holy Cross community as an undergraduate at Notre Dame, Koeth has worked hard toward the life he has now.

As a priest, he’s a ministerial presence — leading Mass, hearing confessions, and being a spiritual resource for students. As an assistant professor in the Department of History, he teaches and researches urban and religious history in 20th-century America.

It’s an opportunity for Koeth to continue delving into his passions for history and his faith — using both to elevate each other.

“When I came to Notre Dame and met the Holy Cross community, it clicked that both of these things that were attractive to me — ministry and academia — weren’t opposites,” Koeth said. “I didn’t have to pick one or the other. That’s why I joined the congregation — because it proposed a life where I could be a priest-scholar.

Finding the Catholic throughline

Koeth has been a history scholar since elementary school — his first academic accolade was in fourth grade, when he won the Staten Island-wide social studies fair.

Inspired by a family vacation, his award-winning project detailed British Gen. John Burgoyne’s failed Revolutionary War campaign to capture New York City and thereby separate the northern and southern American colonies. Koeth’s parents always tried to instill in him and his brother a love of history, driving the family car to historical sites, national parks, and museums.

“History was always in my blood,” Koeth said.

During graduate school at Columbia University, Koeth took courses that helped him discover how urban history could take him as far as the road trips of his childhood — across his interests in immigration, labor, political, and religious history.

“Urban history was the perfect way for me to hold all of these historical interests together,” he said.

In his first book, Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America (University of Chicago, 2025), Koeth explored a nationwide public housing movement — specifically, how post-World War II suburbanization changed the idea of a parish, the relationship between clergy and laity, and Catholic participation in politics, which triggered a broader cultural shift in the Catholic Church.

Now, his new Poverty Initiative-supported project, tentatively titled “Unless the Lord Builds the House: A Religious History of U.S. Public and Affordable Housing,” will focus on how the Church was involved in public and affordable housing in the mid-20th century.

During the Great Depression, the federal government funded public housing for the first time, which the Church pushed for alongside housing activists. The first residents of public housing complexes were often working-class Catholics — descendants of Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrants who brought parishes with them. Priests became staunch defenders of public housing, creating a nationwide network of advocacy.

“My book can hopefully inspire religious actors to do more in the housing sector — to serve our poorest citizens.”

“You could tell that story individually through cities — Bridgeport, Denver, Chicago, San Antonio,” Koeth said. “But when you recognize they’re all connected through the Church, sharing information and tactics, there is this national housing effort on the part of the Church.”

After World War II, the GI Bill enabled most white Americans to find housing in the suburbs. But Black Americans — limited by discriminatory housing and employment practices — did not enjoy the same mobility, becoming the majority population in public housing.

Simultaneously, government funding for public housing collapsed, and complexes fell into disrepair and were rampant with poverty and crime. In this era, Koeth found, public housing was a last resort for America’s poorest citizens rather than a working-class stepping stone to self-sufficiency.

But despite the changing religious demographics of the neighborhoods, Catholic parishes and their priests remained. Koeth found in his research that their commitment to public housing communities only increased, and they sought to expand services for complexes and fund urban schools as tax revenue left the cities.

The 1970s and ’80s brought the demolition of many high-rise housing projects, as the government prioritized building new structures instead of maintaining current residences. It then became clear that low-income affordable housing would be better implemented in collaboration with the private sector, Koeth said. The Church stepped up to form public-private partnerships for building affordable housing and put public money into programs run by nonprofits like Catholic Charities.

“From the 1930s until today, the Church is this thoroughline, involved in housing matters all along,” Koeth said.

This national story hasn’t been told before, as the history of public housing is usually explained through a federal policy lens. Koeth argues that understanding religious involvement in public housing is crucial to understanding how the welfare state works and how it could work.

The Poverty Initiative, a key component of Notre Dame 2033: A Strategic Framework, is dedicated to learning why poverty exists and how its impact can be limited. Addressing housing scarcity and inequality is a key component of the initiative’s work, and Koeth’s research shows how the Catholic Church has previously tackled the issue.

“I’m not writing a manual about how to do it,” he said. “But my book can hopefully inspire religious actors to do more in the housing sector — to serve our poorest citizens.”

Teaching active citizenship

Koeth’s love of his research is only matched by his love for the students he serves as a priest and teacher.

“The most fun I have is in my work as priest-in-residence,” he said. “I love living with the students and getting to be a part of their day-to-day lives.”

In the classroom, Koeth teaches courses aligned with his research interests. In the course The Priest and Nun in American History and Culture, he covers the religious side: American Catholic history beginning with Europeans’ first interactions with Indigenous groups. Students examine the ministry of priests and nuns, as well as depictions of them in popular culture.

He covers urban history in a University Seminar called Cities and Suburbs, telling the story of urban development in the U.S. from World War II to today. He talks about things like mass production of suburban homes, the interstate highway system, and gentrification. The material doesn’t seem too alarming, but Koeth approaches the course with a sinister goal.

“I tell students, ‘I want to ruin the way that you look at the place where you live for the rest of your life,’” he said.

He does this by making students see the forces that have shaped the modern American metropolitan landscape. Rarely are the locations and designs of roads, factories, and housing by chance — instead, he shows how it comes from intentional decisions influenced by race, class, immigration, religion, gender, politics, and many other factors.

Koeth wants his students to always ask, “This is how it is now, but how did it get there, and why?”

He knows he’s making an impact because of emails he gets from former students with photos and stories of their cities, explaining the connections they learned in the course. As with his research, Koeth hopes those connections turn into action.

“I don’t want my students to ever be complacent, to take the places they live for granted,” he said. “We can fix some of the problems and then make better choices going forward as active citizens.”

Originally published by Adah McMillan at al.nd.edu on June 17, 2026.

The encyclical was officially signed on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical responding to the industrial revolution, Rerum novarum.

Below, University of Notre Dame faculty experts from the College of Arts & Letters offer their insights into the document.

Rev. Daniel Groody, C.S.C.

Rev. Daniel Groody, C.S.C., serves as vice president and associate provost for undergraduate education and professor of theology and global affairs. In addition to his role at Notre Dame, Father Groody is a member of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and plays a key role in Notre Dame’s partnership with the Vatican’s Laudato Si’ Center on issues of integral ecology and global sustainability. His research focuses primarily on migration, theology, refugees, and human displacement.

“Pope Leo’s Magnifica humanitas calls us to continually discern what it means to be human before God in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence,” Father Groody said. “While this new digital age offers unprecedented possibilities for development, it simultaneously demands that we rediscover the true contours of our humanity. This authentic identity — rooted in an interior life, a moral conscience, human connections, and a transcendent relationship to divine love — can never be quantified, modeled or replicated by machine learning. Against the technocratic impulse to reduce the human person to a mere data point, the encyclical boldly reasserts that we cannot be measured solely by technological acceleration but by holistic human development, human dignity, and our commitment to the common good.

“Alongside new innovations, artificial intelligence reveals ancient temptations of radical self-sufficiency and idolatry. Warning against the modern temptation to construct a digital Tower of Babel in the pursuit of technological mastery, Pope Leo calls us instead to channel our energies into building the Kingdom of God and animating a ‘Civilization of Love.’ This sacred task requires an unwavering willingness to denounce the false forms of power that isolate us in algorithmic silos and blind us to our neighbors. In their place, Magnifica humanitas proposes a vision of life firmly anchored in justice, ultimately steering humanity toward the right ordering of our relationships with one another, with technology and with the Creator.”

Meghan Sullivan

Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy and director of the Notre Dame Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. She leads a national research and public engagement initiative on AI and human dignity and meets regularly with tech leaders and AI developers in Silicon Valley. In March, Sullivan attended an Anthropic summit to discuss how to guide the moral development of the corporation’s chatbot, Claude.

“Magnifica humanitas is one of the most compelling and comprehensive treatments of AI ethics I have ever read — and I say that as someone who has spent the past few years immersed in this literature from both philosophical and policy perspectives,” Sullivan said. “Pope Leo XIV grounds AI ethics in the Church’s long-standing social doctrine, which has consistently offered a profound vision of human dignity.

“Christian tradition has never grounded human dignity in cognitive performance or economic productivity. It has never said: You matter because of what you can do. It says: You matter because of who you are. Someone with a body, mind, and soul. Someone built for love. Someone with a mind oriented toward truth, accountable for our choices. We’re vulnerable in a way that these AI models are not. And Pope Leo argues that this special belovedness — made in God’s own image — makes us magnificent.

“What strikes me most is how practical this document is. It gives concrete guidance to corporate leaders, to policymakers, to educators, to everyday people navigating this technology. For those of us at Notre Dame, the pope’s charge to educational institutions is especially urgent. He argues that schools must resist the pressure to simply accelerate alongside the digital world and instead become irreplaceable centers of human formation — places where knowledge is integrated, where real relationships are built, where students discover the meaning of human dignity.

“This is exactly the work that Notre Dame’s DELTA network exists to do. With a generous $50.8 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., we are going to put this teaching on human dignity and AI into action — across K-12 schools, universities, churches, and the public square. Today’s encyclical gives us both the theological framework and the moral insight we need. Notre Dame is ready to help the Church and the world answer Pope Leo’s call.”

Kathleen Sprows Cummings

Kathleen Sprows Cummings is a professor of American studies and history and director of the Global Catholic Research Initiative. A papal analyst for NBC/MSNBC, she offered expert commentary during the 2014 canonization of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII, Pope Francis’ U.S. visit in 2015, Pope Francis’ funeral in 2025, and the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV.

“‘Age gives way to age,’ wrote Pope Leo XIII in Rerum novarum, ‘but the events of one century are wonderfully like those of another, for they are directed by the Providence of God.’ In Magnifica humanitas, an encyclical dated exactly 135 years after Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIV also invokes God’s invisible work in history,” Cummings said. “And, like his namesake, he considers the central challenge of the age — in this case, the advent of artificial intelligence — in light of the Church’s timeless principles.

“More humble in tone than Rerum novarum, Magnifica humanitas is a far more capacious document that operates on several levels at once: an explanation of Catholic social teaching as it has developed since Rerum novarum; an affirmation of the intrinsic, God-given value of each person, which is not tied to what they achieve or produce; a rumination on the wonder and limitations of being human; a meditation on history, including an unflinching acknowledgement of the Church’s complicity in its darker moments; and an invitation to individuals and institutions to think creatively and collaboratively about how to ‘disarm’ new technologies and harness them for good.

“In his powerful conclusion, Pope Leo entrusts this endeavor to Mary, quoting from the Magnificat, her revolutionary ‘song of hope’ which glorifies the God who delivers the humble and oppressed, dislodges the privileged from their positions of power, and continues to make all things new in this and in every age. In that sense, Magnifica humanitas ultimately offers consolation to a world in desperate need of it.”

Additional Notre Dame experts on the AI encyclical and a statement from University President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., are available.

Contact: Carrie Gates, associate director of media relations, 574-993-9220, c.gates@nd.edu

Originally published by Notre Dame News at news.nd.edu on May 25, 2026.

John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost and Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, has been elected to the Society of American Historians “in recognition of the narrative power and scholarly distinction” of his historical work. McGreevy was officially installed during the society’s annual meeting and awards ceremony on May 11 in New York City.

The society, based at Columbia University, was founded in 1939 to promote literary distinction in the writing of history and biography. Members are elected based on achievement in “the vivid and compelling presentation of history and biography in a variety of forms.” The society’s 450 current members include prominent academics, public historians, and professional writers working on topics in American history. They include Notre Dame history professor emeritus Mark Noll; award-winning biographers Robert Caro and Ron Chernow, and scholars such as Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a New Yorker staff writer.

“This is an unexpected honor,” said McGreevy, “and I am grateful to the members of the Society of American Historians for electing me. I’m also grateful to friends and colleagues at Notre Dame for supporting my scholarship over many years. The most compelling historical writing is at once rigorous and accessible, and I’ve tried to the best of my ability to reach that standard in my books and essays.”

McGreevy’s historical scholarship focuses on both American and global religion and politics. He is the author of four books that explore the people and the impact of the Catholic Church—the most recent of which, Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis, was published by W.W. Norton and released in September 2022. A French translation was published by Desclée de Brouwer in 2025. His other books include Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North (University of Chicago Press, 1996), Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (W.W. Norton, 2003), and American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton University Press, 2016).

He has received major fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Louisville Institute, and the Erasmus Institute, and he served on the Pulitzer Prize jury for History in 2010. McGreevy has published articles and reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, Journal of American History, New York Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, The New Republic, Chicago Tribune, and other venues. His essays have been translated into Italian, French, and Spanish.

McGreevy has served as Notre Dame’s provost since July 1, 2022, and was recently elected to a second five-year term beginning July 1, 2027. Previously, he was the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters from 2008 to 2018 and chair of the Department of History from 2002 to 2008.

He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Notre Dame and his master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Stanford University. McGreevy was the Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History and History and Literature at Harvard before joining Notre Dame’s faculty.

Originally published by Notre Dame News at al.nd.edu on May 19, 2026.

In partnership with three of the university’s Strategic Initiatives, the Franco Institute is funding seven new interdisciplinary collaboratives.

Arts Collaboratives (co-sponsored by the ND Arts Initiative):

Through a project titled “Archipelagos of Race,” Thomas Anderson, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Xavier Navarro Aquino, assistant professor of English, will investigate the artistic, linguistic, and cultural dimensions of race and ethnicity in the Caribbean through theoretical inquiry and artistic output.

Tatiana Reinoza, associate professor of art history, and history professor Karen Graubart seek to integrate humanities studies to ask broad questions, often related to policy, in their lab titled “Central American Racial Formations.” They believe that integrating humanities-based analysis with questions more commonly addressed through social sciences and policy will produce deeper and more people-centered scholarship and open new paths for understanding social injuries, connectivities, and conflicts.

Global Catholic Research Collaboratives (co-sponsored by the ND Global Catholic Research Initiative):

In “Medieval Roots to Global Networks: Catholic Sisters and the Archive,” Katie Bugyis, associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and Director of Postdoctoral Studies, and CJ Jones, Director of the Medieval Institute and professor in the Department of German, Slavic, and Eurasian Studies, draws on archival collections to examine how Catholic women religious communities understood, interpreted, and transmitted their histories as makers of historical knowledge who shaped their own institutional identities through scholarship, pedagogy, and archival practices.

Associate professor of philosophy Therese Cory and theology professor Paulinus Odozor have formed an international working group for their collaborative titled “Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition.” This collaborative works with 150 members engaged in the ongoing interpretation of the second Vatican Council and its significance for the global Church and in regional contexts.

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Director for the Global Catholic Research Initiative, values the Strategic Initiatives’ partnership with the Franco Institute. “The Global Catholic Research Initiative is proud to partner with the Franco Family Institute in supporting two of this year’s Research Innovation Collaboratives,” Cummings said. She further shared, “By funding ‘From Medieval Roots to Global Networks: Catholic Sisters and the Archive’ and the International Working Group, ‘Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition,’ GCRI is investing in projects that exemplify the global scope, historical depth, and interdisciplinary strength of Notre Dame scholarship.” In sum, Cummings stressed the importance of the Research Innovation Collaboratives’ role in scholarship at Notre Dame. “Together, these collaborations advance the University’s mission to become the preeminent hub for research on global Catholicism,” she said.

Humanities Collaboratives:

William Donahue, professor in the Department of German, Slavic, and Eurasian Studies, will work with Jens Martin of the University of Amsterdam on a project titled “Contested History in Public Spaces: Toward a Global Memory Culture.” Their collaborative re-thinks terminology around public memory to accommodate the challenges around a “memory culture” that functions in dynamic and sometimes unpredictable patterns.

For their collaborative titled “Symphonic Wings Part II: Sustaining Our Common Home through Faith, Science, and Art,” Cynthia Katsarelis, assistant professor of the practice in Sacred Music and Ritornello Chamber Orchestra Director, and Paul Kollman, associate professor of theology, will turn their symphony project Symphonic Wings into a lasting and public-facing platform for thinking about insects through lenses of faith, culture, history, ethics, and care for the living world.

Sustainability Collaboratives (co-sponsored by the ND Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative):

History professor Julia Thomas will partner with Benjamin Goossen, an assistant professor of international history at Boston University, on “Asia and the Anthropocene: Bringing Human Histories and Earth History Together.” Their collaborative approaches the human activity of the Anthropocene from Asian perspectives to address what may be most useful about the Anthropocene as a distinctive framework for Asian histories and what drawbacks to such a framework may exist.

Originally published by Jacob Schepers at franco.nd.edu on May 05, 2026.

University of Notre Dame historian Katlyn Carter has won a 2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the Carnegie Corporation of New York announced Tuesday (May 5).

Carter, an associate professor in the Department of History, was one of 24 scholars and writers from a record 381 nominees to receive the honor. The fellowship includes a two-year grant of up to $200,000 to support research for her second book, The Politics of Truth in Early America, and to develop an undergraduate course aimed at the fellowship’s theme of understanding and addressing political polarization in the United States. The stipend is among the most generous of its kind, and previous Carnegie fellows have received numerous honors for their research, such as the Nobel Prize and National Book Award.

“Concern about the declining importance of truth in American politics is a crisis that can feel new to us, but Katlyn’s scholarship is a reminder that this phenomenon has existed since the founding of our country,” said Kenneth Scheve, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters and a professor of political science. “I’m thrilled that the Carnegie Corporation is supporting her vital research on this topic, which will provide a much-needed historical lens to a question that is so fundamental to contemporary social and political life.”

A historian of 18th-century America and France, Carter explores research topics inspired by issues that feel intractable in our politics today, she said.

In her first book, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale University Press, 2023), Carter explored how decisions and debates about the place of secrecy in politics during early American and French revolutionary history shaped representative democracy and addressed the realities of what it meant to make government transparent in practice.

The book earned the Gilbert Chinard Book Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, was shortlisted for the Rodel Institute’s Edwards Book Award for its outstanding contribution to the understanding and practice of democracy and American politics, and received an honorable mention for the Louis Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for 18th Century Studies.

Through that project, Carter began developing questions about the origins of truth and trust as they related to the press and government — specifically in the United States.

“It’s one thing to say this group of people met in secret and talked about this, and that became a flash point. It’s another thing for people to say, ‘those people are lying to you, and I’m telling you the truth,’” Carter said. “And I just started getting really interested in tracing that in early American political debates and rhetoric.”

In The Politics of Truth in Early America, Carter will examine those large topics of truth, trust, communication technology, and politics in early American history by exploring digital archives and traveling to historic research centers and libraries in Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, London, Paris, and Washington, D.C.

She will also take the time to develop a course tentatively titled The Politics of Truth: A History, which will aim to “historicize some of the tough questions that we’re wrestling with today about truth and politics.”

“I want to try to take those challenges and try to break students out of this rigid political binary that we’re in right now by taking these difficult questions and translating them to history,” Carter said. “I just don’t think we can understand these challenges without understanding the history of those problems, of the political system we live in or of the way people have thought about these questions in the past.”

The Carnegie Fellowship class of 2026 is the third cohort focused on developing a body of rigorous, evidence-based research about what can be done to strengthen the forces of cohesion in the United States, an overarching priority for the foundation’s grant-making. The 2026 class also includes Notre Dame alumnus Wayde Marsh, who received a Ph.D. in political science in 2022 and is now an assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

With support from the Notre Dame Office of the Provost and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good, Carter became the fourth Notre Dame faculty member to receive a Carnegie Fellowship. David Campbell, the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy, and Atalia Omer, professor of religion, conflict, and peace studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs, both won in 2017, and political scientist Sarah Zukerman Daley won in 2018.

“There was a team of people at Notre Dame who are really skilled at what they’re doing and who really helped me deliver the message clearly and connect to the theme of the fellowship,” Carter said. “Important research and scholarship that connects with people and helps inform and work on current challenges takes time. This fellowship actually gives researchers time to read and think, which is increasingly rare in a society that really likes to push for efficiency and going fast. That’s really valuable.”

Originally published by Mary Kinney at news.nd.edu on May 05, 2026.

The new cohort follows a successful first year of the Franco Humanities Fellows program. This year's cohort includes faculty who received awards through two new programs: the Franco Public Fellowship and the Franco Mid-Career Fellowship.

Franco Humanities Fellows

Humanities Fellowships support full-time research in the humanities by individual faculty in Arts & Letters.

Emiliano Aguilar (History)

Ijeoma Kola (History)

Liam Kruger (English)

Johannes Junge Ruhland (Romance Languages and Literatures)

Emily Wang (German, Slavic, and Eurasian Studies)

Xueying Wang (Theology)

Franco Public Fellows

Public Fellowships support publicly engaged scholarship by individual faculty working in any discipline in Arts & Letters.

Cyraina Johnson-Roullier (English)

Emmanuel Katongole (Theology)

Johnny Zhang (Psychology)

Franco Mid-Career Fellows

Mid-Career Fellowships support associate and full professors in any discipline in Arts & Letters aiming to develop new skills for a future research project.

Johannes Göransson (English)

Martina Lopez (Art, Art History, & Design)

Originally published by Jacob Schepers at franco.nd.edu on April 30, 2026.

John Deak is helping write the next chapter in the story of one of Austria’s oldest historical research institutions.

An associate professor in the Department of History, Deak is one of the first non-Austrian members of the Commission for Modern Austrian History.

Members of the commission have historically been Austrian themselves, but the definition of “Austrian” has changed in the organization’s lifetime.

Established in 1897, the commission tasked academic historians with curating and publishing the history of the Habsburg Empire, a territory comprising parts of 13 different modern nations. At the end of World War I, the empire collapsed, and a realm that had previously encompassed much of Central Europe became the far smaller country of Austria.

As Austria’s dominion shrank, so too did the scope of the commission. But Deak’s new membership is a sign that the organization is returning to its roots.

“They’re trying to be more international, transnational now in order to capture the shared past of all these peoples of Central Europe,” Deak said.

As a scholar of the Habsburg Empire and past winner of the Austrian State Prize in History who can read several European languages, Deak is ideal for the role. And as a frequent patron of Austrian archives and reader of the commission’s publications, he’s excited to accept.

“I have a lot of respect for the commission’s historians, whose works I have read and used and appreciated,” Deak said. “To be included with them is an honor.”

A larger community

Deak has been a Habsburg buff for longer than he’s been a historian, beginning when he researched his family history in grade school. When he learned his family immigrated from Central Europe before World War I, he discovered a new way of seeing history.

Before the 20th century, European lives didn’t sit neatly within national borders — they were multilingual, and ethnicity wasn’t a factor in daily life or politics. Deak said that studying Central European history by individual countries often gives a skewed, artificial view of how people lived.

“The idea of nations has basically sucked all the past up into a vacuum and reinterpreted it,” he said.

“What we can easily forget is part of the work of a historian — which is most of the time sitting in an office, reading and writing and being alone — is that you’re part of a larger community that’s working together.”

The search for a more accurate picture of the past is why Deak is a historian of the Habsburg Empire — a world without modern boundaries. The effects of the commission’s work are already felt past Austrian borders, Deak said, as its publications are an essential resource for researchers throughout the world. Many historical sources related to the history of Central Europe are stored in Austrian archives, so scholars of the region who don’t live in Austria struggle to access them.

“If you live in western Ukraine and you’re interested in western Ukraine, a lot of the archival sources aren’t available in Kyiv, and getting to Vienna from western Ukraine is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming,” Deak said. “So the commission works to make available sources for all of these people who have an imperial Central European inheritance.”

The commission publishes edited transcriptions of historical sources, as well as expert academic works of interpretive history. As a new member, Deak will review and produce these publications in joint projects that involve multiple scholars and governments.

For Deak, who frequently takes undergraduates to Europe to visit battlefields and World War I memorials as part of his Great War and Modern Memory course, the opportunity offers a chance for him to further explore his own research interests and to deeply connect with Central Europe’s historical community.

“What we can easily forget is part of the work of a historian — which is most of the time sitting in an office, reading and writing and being alone — is that you’re part of a larger community that’s working together,” Deak said.

Reinterpreting history

Deak embraced another collaborative opportunity in writing his upcoming book, tentatively titled “The First World War and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire,” co-authored with military historian Jonathan Gumz of the University of Birmingham.

The book counters a widely accepted narrative of the fall of the Habsburg Empire. For a long time, Deak said, historians have argued that the Habsburg Empire was too old-fashioned to survive in the 20th century, and that its institutions couldn’t accommodate its multinational population.

“Therefore, they think of the First World War as just a strong wind that blew a condemned building down,” Deak said.

But the book retells the Empire’s fall as something more complex. In his research, Deak sees a strong state with a long history of adapting to crises and strong constitutions, led by politicians who believed in justice and the rule of law. For the people of Central Europe, the collapse of their governments was unexpected and calamitous.

To understand how it happened, Deak said, historians can’t dismiss the details. The book explores the intricacies of World War I and how a state of emergency — accompanied by the weakening of civil rights and the rule of law — destroyed a vibrant empire.

“Things like democracy, constitutions, rule of law — we tend to think that they are impervious to attacks, but they’re actually really fragile,” Deak said. “We have to take care of them.”

Deak and Gumz have been working on the book for a decade, with a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities bringing them to the finish line. Now the two historians just need to complete the final chapter, though Deak said the research they found was so rich it couldn’t fit within the bounds of the already-large manuscript.

Luckily, that means Deak has plenty of inspiration for future projects, and he has already picked a topic for his next book. In paging through military court records, he found the story of a duel gone wrong between a composer and an officer of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1909.

“It’s an international court case and a scandal,” he said. “It’s an interesting story, and there are moral lessons about honor and equality before the law.”

Originally published by Adah McMillan at al.nd.edu on January 26, 2026.

The internship comes as part of the Franco Institute’s expanded mission to foster the liberal arts’ engagement with the public good. As a disciplinary focus, “public humanities” bridge the gap between scholarly production and public engagement, fostering collaborative efforts to explore the world and our uniquely human place within it. The UPHI offers students the opportunity to use their humanities skills in service to their community while learning how knowledge is produced through the lives, actions, and experiences of community members.

This year's seven student interns from the College of Arts & Letters met together for breakfast and orientation on Friday, January 16, with Franco Institute staff members Lindsay Paturalski, Jake Schepers, and Emmanuel Ojeifo. The students learned about the internship’s expectations and explored best practices and methodologies for public humanities research.

All students receive support from the Institute during the spring 2026 semester as they work with their respective community partners and prepare research related to this year's annual research theme of Attention. In addition, the interns will present their work as part of a poster session at the Institute's Day | Merton Symposium in April. "It's exciting to see this terrific cohort of Arts & Letters students working at the interface of humanities research and the publics to whom it matters. We're looking forward to a great first semester of public humanities work and to celebrating that work at our spring symposium," said Kate Marshall, the Institute's Director.

The Franco Institute is pleased to share its incoming class of the Undergraduate Public Humanities Internship:

Elizabeth Coleman (Psychology, Pre-Health) with Reins of Life

Eric Derr (Program of Liberal Studies) with The Studebaker National Museum

Aubrey Keegan (Sociology and Sheedy Family Program) with United Youth Theatre

Jun Wei Lee (History) with La Casa de Amistad

James Thompson (Sociology) with Commonweal

Jasmine Williams (Psychology) with Boys & Girls Clubs of the Northern Indiana Corridor

Rain Zhang (Medieval Studies) with Commonweal

Originally published by Jacob Schepers at franco.nd.edu on January 22, 2026.

Established in 1946, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers students and young professionals from all backgrounds the opportunity to study or teach abroad with support from the U.S. government.

In applying for the award, undergraduate students work closely with the Flatley Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement (CUSE) and graduate students with the Graduate School’s Office of Grants and Fellowships.

"Given the headwinds of this year's Fulbright cycle, including funding uncertainty and later final notifications, Mathilda Nassar, Emily Buika Hunt, and I are incredibly proud of our students for their grit and ultimate success,” said Elise Rudt-Moorthy, associate director of national fellowships at CUSE. “It was an honor working with everyone throughout the summer and fall, and we would like to thank all the faculty and alumni who helped with advising.”

Michael Skalski, associate program director in the Office of Grants and Fellowships, said, “We are very proud of and congratulate all our Fulbrighters this year. Our fellows worked hard and diligently on their applications, so we have the utmost confidence that they will represent Notre Dame and the U.S. in the best way possible in their host countries.”

The finalists, with Arts & Letters students bolded, are:

Undergraduate

• Aria Bossone, American studies and peace studies (supplemental), English teaching assistantship to Spain

• Charlotte Cardarella, honors anthropology and Arabic, English teaching assistantship to Spain

• Mary Kate Cashman, political science and peace studies (supplemental), English teaching assistantship to Kosovo

• Eva Garces-Foley, anthropology, peace studies (supplemental), and Spanish (supplemental), English teaching assistantship to Spain

• Juliet Hare, political science, global affairs (supplemental with a concentration in international peace studies), and French (supplemental), English teaching assistantship to Luxembourg

• Ethan Harned, psychology and pre-health studies (supplemental), Fulbright-Nehru open study/research award to India

• Sarah Hui, Program of Liberal Studies and theology, open study/research award to Italy

• Joseph Kositzke, American studies, English teaching assistantship to Spain

• Joseph Lufti, American studies and Arabic, English teaching assistantship to Georgia

• Leslie Martin, global affairs and Latino studies (supplemental), English teaching assistantship to Colombia

• Matthew McCollum, honors international economics, English teaching assistantship to Germany

• Maria Murinova, Program of Liberal Studies, English teaching assistantship to the Slovak Republic

• Margaret O’Brien, political science and Italian (supplemental with a concentration in Irish studies), English teaching assistantship to Italy

• Jasmine Peña Ramirez, political science and Latino studies (supplemental), English teaching assistantship to South Korea

• Theresa Salazar, preprofessional studies and theology (supplemental), English teaching assistantship to Spain

• Alexandra Sutton, political science, English teaching assistantship to Lithuania

• Sarah Van Hollebeke, political science and German, English teaching assistantship to Germany

• Juliet Webb, anthropology and peace studies (supplemental), English teaching assistantship to Senegal

Graduate

• Christopher Cirelli, master of education (Alliance for Catholic Education), English teaching assistantship to Italy

• Montana Garcia, master of education (Alliance for Catholic Education), English teaching assistantship to Malta

• Nicholas Herrud, history, open study/research award to Lithuania

• Natasha Rodgers, French and Francophone studies, English teaching assistantship to Mauritius

Originally published by Erin Blasko at news.nd.edu on July 29, 2025.

As the Spring 2025 semester drew to a close, the History Department at the University of Notre Dame hosted the Transatlantic Workshop by welcoming professors, postdoctoral researchers, PhD candidates, and graduate students from institutional counterparts in Germany and Ukraine. Generous funding from the Nanovic Institute and the History Department made the workshop possible. While the workshop follows a tradition of academic exchange with Bielefeld University since 2010, this year’s iteration welcomed, for the first time, participants from the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv. All of this to promote academic exchange and professional networking between Notre Dame’s sister institutions, organized by Professor Alexander Martin and his Bielefeld colleagues, Bettina Brandt and Professor Frank Grüner.

Beneficial interdisciplinary dialogue between peers

Over the course of four days, from May 2 to May 5, thirteen PhD candidates and graduate students from all three universities presented and workshopped research papers within seven sessions, including two lectures on current research projects by Professor Volodymyr Sklokin (UCU) and postdoctoral researcher Gion Wallmeyer (Bielefeld). Topics ranged from ancient and medieval histories to contemporary history, shedding new light on actors and historical events from the Roman and Hellenistic empires, Eastern European borderlands, and historical processes in the Americas from the early colonial period to the 20^th century. By employing diverse analytical lenses from various fields, such as environmental, gender, religious, and borderlands history, as well as perspectives from law, warfare, the arts, and violence studies, participants’ papers provided each other with a fruitful space to give and receive feedback. The resulting thematical variety encompassed research projects on the socio-political status of an ethnographer in late antiquity, on similarities between Basilian iconographies and their devout in eighteenth century Ruthenia, as well as on the role of the kudzu vine in the US state of Georgia, from a profitable soil-rescuing and aesthetic plant to an invasive non-indigenous weed in the mid twentieth century.

The subject-specific depth and thematic range of the contributions discussed, as well as the dialogue between three academic cultures and different disciplinary approaches, was perceived by the participants as very beneficial for their work, as Nataliia Fedyshyn, a PhD candidate in History at UCU summarized: “The workshop offered a valuable opportunity to reflect on how my research, rooted in Ukrainian material, resonates within broader historiographical and methodological discussions. It was especially helpful to hear feedback on the clarity of my research question and the relevance of my methodological approach from colleagues with diverse academic backgrounds.”

In particular, the underlying idea of the workshop format—dedicating a whole session to each participant’s research and having a designated discussant open the dialogue with individuals providing perspectives from different academic career levels—ensured a constructive working atmosphere, which both organizers and participants perceived as mutually beneficial. Additionally, Marthe Becker, a PhD candidate at Bielefeld and participant of previous Transatlantic Workshops, felt that the extension of this year’s edition to three universities was an enriching asset. Marirose Osborne, a rising second-year PhD student at Notre Dame, also agreed with this, adding: “It gave me an opportunity to learn a lot—both about advanced degree programs in Germany and Ukraine, and about life as an advanced PhD student at Notre Dame.”

Beyond the program and scheduled activities, the visiting participants had the opportunity to engage with Notre-Dame-based scholars in their respective fields and gain insight into the US university system and life on campus by conversing with their peers between workshop sessions. These discussions were facilitated by time away from a strictly academic setting during lunch at the South and North dining halls on campus, as well as during a guided tour where participants were introduced to Notre Dame’s history by the current Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History, Alex Martin.

Exploring new sites and learning about the global within local history

As part of the workshop experience, participants had the opportunity to take a day trip to Chicago, allowing them to gain insights into the Midwest’s geographic and environmental characteristics, as well as its historical development from the onset of French and British colonization. They learned about Chicago’s rapid ascent as a juncture of national commodity transport flows between the East and West coasts during the nineteenth century, and the role of industrial growth and decline in key cities like Gary and South Bend. In Chicago, the participants visited one of

Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic houses, currently located within the University of Chicago Campus, a milestone in global architectural history. The participants traced the city’s status as an international hub for urban development from above, admiring the skyline and the shores of Lake Michigan from the Hancock Tower in downtown Chicago. The tour concluded with a meal at a local restaurant and a short stroll through Millennium Park.

The 2025 edition of the Transatlantic Workshop ended with a visit to South Bend’s The History Museum and the Oliver Mansion, where participants learned about the lifestyle of the city’s industrial aristocracy dating to the late 19^th century. Many students found this introduction to South Bend’s local history instructive for their understanding of the city’s development beyond the Notre Dame campus. For example, Wenzheng Fang, a PhD candidate at Notre Dame, said about the experience of learning about South Bend’s history: “Having been to the Bielefeld side of the workshop, I did not expect the experience of the workshop in my home department to match the excitement of visiting another country, but it did!...I also, surprisingly, got more interested in the local history of The Oliver Plow Works as an agricultural historian through our well-organized excursion!”

The workshop concluded with many heartfelt and collegial goodbyes with local Irish food, music, and conversation at Fiddler’s Hearth in downtown South Bend. This included a productive exchange of ideas, feedback, and networking among graduate students from Bielefeld, Lviv, and Notre Dame, fostering professional relationships among historians at different stages of their academic careers. Many participants expressed in their reflections how they will carry forward what they learned at the workshop as they complete their studies in the coming years, especially as it served as an instructive experience for younger academics on what it takes to set up functional international cooperation with colleagues from around the world.

Thomas Burman, the Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute and a professor of history, and Karen Graubart, a professor in the Department of History, are two of the 198 scholars, scientists, and artists chosen based on their prior career achievement and exceptional promise.

The Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 people over the past century, including members of national academies, Pulitzer Prize winners, and more than 125 Nobel laureates.

“We are thrilled to see two of our scholars receive this prestigious recognition from the Guggenheim Foundation,” said Ernest Morrell, associate dean for the humanities and equity and the Coyle Professor of Literacy Education. “This support for their work is testament to their groundbreaking scholarship and insightful analysis, and it underscores the strength and caliber of the research done throughout our history department.”

Engaging the religious other

Burman will use his fellowship to finish a book he’s been working on for more than a decade, tentatively titled “Beyond the Mediterranean: The Intellectual Venture of Ramon Martí.”

Martí, a 13th-century Dominican friar, wrote enormous works exploring and refuting Judaism. He also wrote shorter works directed at Islam, which was unusual for a medieval Latin European scholar.

“This book is an attempt to take in the full arc of Martí’s career and also — maybe more significantly — to place it in a broader intellectual context than he’s been looked at in before,” Burman said.

Burman, the past recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, has spent most of his career examining interactions across religious divides during the Middle Ages.

“There’s a lot of interesting research about what ordinary people in medieval Europe thought about Judaism and Islam,” Burman said. “But I’ve always been most interested in what the people who know the other religions best think about these religions. How do they engage this religious other?”

Burman’s research will also be aided by his recently awarded membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and he will spend the next year there working on his book and collaborating with other medievalists in his cohort.

“Both of these recognitions have been aspirations that, for most of my career, seemed well beyond me,” he said. “So I’m equally delighted to be spending a year there.”

Self-representation in the African diaspora

In “Making Malambo: Free Black Collectivity in Early Spanish America,” historian Graubart will examine how a free African-descent community in colonial Panama represented itself in conversation with Spanish officials.

In the late 16th century, Spanish King Philip II imposed a new tax on all free Black people and people with mixed African heritage within the empire. In response, the targeted community in Panama organized a collective petition detailing their challenges and accomplishments.

“My work provides ways to think about not only what kind of work they did, and how they were overlooked by so many, but also what kind of influence they were able to exercise over these proceedings,” Graubart said.

Graubart — who is also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and whose work has been previously supported by the NEH and the American Council of Learned Societies — will travel during her fellowship year to both Peru and Panama to scour archives that may be relevant to her research.

She is particularly interested in Catholic archives, as she recently received the Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., Prize from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, in partnership with the American Catholic Historical Association, to research Black Catholicism.

“The Catholic Church provided semi-autonomous spaces for enslaved and free people to organize for worship and festivals, including in Panama,” she said. “So I will be thinking about how Catholicism might have shaped their collectivity.”

Continuing a legacy

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

With the addition of Burman and Graubart, 24 Arts & Letters faculty members have won Guggenheims in the last 25 years.

In 2024, Notre Dame awardees were Barbara Montero, the Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy; Program of Liberal Studies professor Gretchen Reydams-Schils; and associate professor of English Roy Scranton.

“Our faculty continue to demonstrate a broad and urgent commitment to the public good of scholarship in the liberal arts,” said Kate Marshall, director of the Franco Institute and associate dean for research and strategic initiatives. “Thomas and Karen are the two latest examples of critical work done throughout the College to expand our understanding of the past in a way that vitally informs our present.”

Originally published by Adah McMillan at al.nd.edu on April 24, 2025.

Each year, 1.3 million people visit the archaeological marvel Stonehenge.

As one of the most famous prehistoric monuments in the world, it showcases a remarkable feat of engineering and ingenuity—and provides researchers with valuable insight into Neolithic and Bronze Age societies and practices.

But what if scholars could see a reproduction of the stones as they were when erected—what new context would be considered and what discoveries could be made by studying a perfectly preserved version of its original form?

The University of Notre Dame offers the opportunity for such insight into 30,000 equally important, and equally irreplaceable, works of human creativity—reproductions of rare medieval manuscripts whose destruction was twice threatened during periods of intense geopolitical conflict.

“These are a preservation of cultural heritage, but in a book form,” said Julia Schneider, the medieval studies subject librarian with Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Libraries.

In her role, Schneider works closely with the College of Arts & Letters’ Medieval Institute and assists students, faculty, and visiting researchers with accessing the unique historical documents, books, and manuscripts housed on the seventh floor of the Hesburgh Library.

For more than six decades, Notre Dame has played a pivotal role in ensuring timeless treasures can never be lost, housing approximately 12,000 reels of microfilm—small-scale photographic negatives of documents and two-dimensional art pieces—containing reproductions of the collections of Biblioteca Ambrosiana, a 400-year-old library in Italy.

The seventh floor of the Hesburgh Library is the only place in the world outside of the Ambrosiana where the collection can be viewed, and for decades scholars of Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, theology, classics, and history have traveled to campus to study what it holds.

“Notre Dame brings many, many scholars from Europe to campus as visitors for lectures or research, and they often say that this is the best library they’ve ever worked with,” said Thomas Burman, the Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute and a professor of history. “They’ll spend an enormous amount of time with our library databases because they can’t get those materials elsewhere. That kind of testament from scholars is an indication of how important our work here is.”

This February, the 65-year relationship between the Hesburgh Libraries and the Ambrosiana will be celebrated with a two-day symposium in which world-renowned medieval scholars will discuss the importance of the partners’ steadfast commitment to preserving history and the need to digitize the collection to ensure its future.

“We want to continue this relationship between the Ambrosiana and Notre Dame,” Schneider said. “And we wanted to recognize this relationship now because we’re at a crossroads as we move from the analog world into promoting the digital collection. We want to commemorate what’s gone before, but also to celebrate what’s coming.”

Read the story

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on February 20, 2025.

(1) The John Highbarger Memorial Award for the best doctoral dissertation

Hannah M. Peckham (Pre-Award Program Manager, Notre Dame Research, University of Notre Dame), “American Outposts: Rethinking U.S. Higher Education Abroad, 1908-1972”

“Hannah Peckham’s dissertation is an outstanding piece of historical research and writing. Spanning the greater part of the twentieth century, it traces the growth and transformation of the loose network of American Protestant colleges and universities in Asia and the Middle East. Drawing on a rich base of archival and published sources, Peckham explores how these schools evolved from the eve of the First World War to the 1970s. Overseas, the schools’ campuses were buffeted by two world wars, the communist revolution in China, the Cold War, and decolonization, while at home, the institutions supporting them in the United States confronted profound shifts in religious life, higher education, and the role of government in American society. Founded in the nineteenth century to spread the sectarian religious teachings of diverse Protestant churches, they developed into instruments of US cultural diplomacy in the service of promoting American-style liberal democracy. Peckham’s elegantly written and cogently argued dissertation unpacks this complex history and tells a convincing overarching story about the American university and its role in the modern world.”

(2) The Vincent P. DeSantis Prize for the best unpublished paper

Ella Hadacek, “‘Our Joan of Arc, Margaret Haley’: Gender, Union Busting, and the Fear of Catholic Power in the Loeb Affair, 1915-1917”

“This paper examines the efforts of women teachers in the Chicago Public Schools to Unionize and join the Chicago Federation of Labor at the turn of the last century. The author expertly weaves together the histories of gender, religion, and nineteenth-century Irish immigration to shed light on an old story in surprising and compelling new ways. The paper is based on research in newspapers, and archival records, and deftly integrates this research into a thorough and competent presentation of the views and contributions of other scholars. It is a model piece of work.”

The book — which details how American democracy was born in secrecy rather than transparency — earned the Gilbert Chinard Book Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. It also was shortlisted for the Rodel Institute’s Edwards Book Award for its outstanding contribution to the understanding and practice of democracy and American politics, and it received an honorable mention for the Louis Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

In this interview, Carter discusses her reaction to the book’s success, the role of transparency and secrecy in democracy, and her next project on the politics of truth in the 18th century.

Please tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m from Portland, Oregon, and went to UC Berkeley, where I majored in history and was a reporter and editor at the campus newspaper, The Daily Californian. After graduating, I moved to Washington, D.C., and I worked in media relations on progressive issue-based campaigns to advocate for legislation like food safety reform and renewable energy standards. I knew I wanted to go back to school and study history, which I did at Princeton University. In graduate school, I brought together my interest in politics today with the history of democracy and media to arrive at my book topic. Before arriving here at Notre Dame, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. Outside teaching and writing, I love to listen to podcasts, read fiction, and spend time outdoors with my husband and two young children.

Congratulations on the awards and reviews for Democracy in Darkness. What does this feedback mean to you?

The warm reception means a great deal to me. Overall, I spent a decade working on this project, from its inception in graduate school to seeing it published. That’s a long time! It was also a time in which a lot of strange, interesting, and sometimes startling events happened in politics, and I increasingly felt an urgency to understand the topic. When the book receives positive feedback, I feel hopeful that I was able to contribute even a little bit to our understanding of democracy.

Why was it important for you to write Democracy in Darkness? What impact do you hope it could have?

I wrote this book because I was curious about how representative democracy came to be and how that initial process continues to shape the way it operates today (in the U.S., and abroad). What does it really mean for a government to be by and for the people? This fundamental question piqued my interest.

When I looked into how people in the 18th century thought about that same question, I quickly saw that the topic of secrecy in government was very important to their thinking. While we tend to see secrecy today as a major threat to democracy — and many in the 18th century did as well — there were also many in the past who saw it as potentially beneficial. I had never really considered how crucial decisions about transparency and secrecy can be to how a democracy works, but my sources continued to highlight how important these decisions were when setting up republics for the first time.

I think recognizing the importance of these questions, and the nuance in terms of their impact on democracy, is crucial if we want a just, efficient, and democratic government. I hope the book highlights this and contributes to a discussion about how democracy works and how we want it to work.

While doing research for your next book project, “The Politics of Truth in Early America,” what have you learned about how truth is arrived at in a democracy? How do we determine whom to trust and can we apply these lessons today?

In short: Americans have never agreed on the Truth with a capital T, or whom to trust in seeking it. While that might seem pessimistic, I actually think it’s helpful for putting our current situation in context. Today is not the first time Americans have grappled with challenges of misinformation and disinformation, fractured and polarized media landscapes, or fundamental disagreements on what is true and false.

The early republic was a time of real experimentation with democratic government and with the public sphere. With this experimentation, there was a lot of anxiety and conflict about the truth — how to secure it, what it was, and whether it mattered in politics. I think knowing this — and knowing how Americans tried, and often failed, to resolve this conflict at the time — is helpful as we try to make sense of our current situation and devise solutions.

How has your previous work in media relations shaped your perspective and choice of research topics?

My job in media relations gave me firsthand experience working in politics at the point of contact between elected officials and “the public,” via the media. This experience raised a lot of questions that I decided to study historically and it provided me with a well of personal experience to draw upon in my research. Thinking about this dynamic (between elected officials, the people, and the press) is at the root of the book topics I’ve chosen.

What’s next?

I’m excited to continue sharing my book, particularly during this election season, with speaking engagements at other universities and libraries as well as podcast interviews. Otherwise, I’ll be working on "The Politics of Truth in Early America" during the spring semester at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University.

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on August 30, 2024.

The University of Notre Dame history professor used his investigative skills — including handwriting analysis — to identify an anonymous man who had written an eyewitness account of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Moscow.

That man, Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch, became a focus of Martin’s microhistory, From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars, which won the 2023 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History.

Martin said the 20-year project remained fresh and interesting throughout.

“There’s this combination of, on one hand, it being a detective job, and it was really fun when I’d discover some new detail,” he said. “And on the other hand, I was trying to figure out what it all meant and how I could relate this to bigger questions from history.”

Reconstructing a life story

The seed for the book project was planted in 2002, when Martin was doing research in an archive in Russia for what would become his 2013 book, Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762-1855.

That book — which won the Marc Raeff Book Prize and the Best Book Award in Non-North American Urban History — included a chapter about Napoleon's occupation of Moscow. When Martin was researching that particular chapter, archivists showed him a notebook that contained an eyewitness account of the occupation that was written in German.

Martin, who grew up in Germany, was fascinated by the author’s details of the French occupation, including riots and fires. The author’s name, though, wasn’t listed.

“That happens a lot,” he said. “You come across a historical document by some random person and you say to yourself, ‘I’d love to know who this person is,’ but you never find out.’”

This time, though, Martin did find out. A couple of years later. While conducting more research in another archive in Russia.

While looking at hundreds of citizen petitions for government aid after the war, Martin noticed details in one of the petitions that matched the notebook description he had read in 2002. The petition was signed by Ivan Rozenshtraukh.

Later, in a Moscow bookshop, Martin came across a copy of an actor’s signature in a theater history book. It matched the handwriting in both the notebook and on the petition. The name? Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch, the German version of Ivan Rozenshtraukh.

“And with that name, I started to be able to reconstruct a whole story. Which was super exciting,” Martin said.

While piecing together Rosenstrauch’s fascinating life story — born a Catholic in Breslau, Germany, in 1768, he died in Kharkov, Russia, as a Lutheran pastor in 1835 — Martin learned Rosenstrauch also had married, divorced, and had four children, including a son who was murdered.

Rosenstrauch also had careers as a barber-surgeon, actor, and successful merchant, and he lived through the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and the Enlightenment.

A history project and an ancestor

Martin decided a microhistory format — which explores how individual people both shape, and are shaped by, historical forces of their time — was ideal for From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars.

Understanding Rosenstrauch’s life, he said, is beneficial for readers interested in how empires and religion can work. And it highlights differences between people in countries and the regimes that govern them.

Judges from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies agreed. The three panelists — who described the book as original, fascinating, brilliant, and gripping — chose Martin’s submission from 54 entries as the outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history.

Martin accepted the book prize in December at the ASEEES Annual Convention in Philadelphia.

The concurrent professor in the Department of German and Russian said he received valuable feedback on the draft from colleagues, both in an interdisciplinary writing group at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and during a 2016 fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.

The large-scale digitization of public documents, archives, manuscripts, genealogy records, books, newspapers, and magazines worldwide also was key to Martin’s research.

And talking with Rosenstrauch’s descendants — in Switzerland, Mississippi, and Moscow — proved enlightening.

“To me, this is a history project. And to them, this is their ancestor,” he said. “The time separating us from Rosenstrauch is basically two long lifetimes. How does that time relate to ours, and how long can memories survive? This was a really interesting chance to think about that.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on March 11, 2024.

One of those students, Rev. Steven M. Avella, a Marquette University historian, offered similar praise from his perspective as a doctoral candidate under Gleason’s tutelage, writing in a published essay: “Gleason the scholar was as formidable an intellectual presence as one would find on any major university campus. … As I look back on my graduate education at Notre Dame … I have come to realize more and more how truly generous and kind he was. He did not fling back dissertation chapters scribbled with caustic comments. There were no stormy confrontations over the scope or spin of research, nor even milder moments of exasperation when we intruded on his work time or called him at home. …We all experienced from him a consistent patience, generosity, and an unflagging encouragement.”

Gleason, a Notre Dame alumnus and much-admired professor in the University’s history department for 47 years, died Wednesday (Jan. 17) in Evanston, Illinois. He was 96.

John McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost of Notre Dame and Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, was a student of Gleason’s.

“Phil Gleason,” McGreevy said, “was one of the great figures in the Department of History’s history: a genuinely distinguished historian of American intellectual and religious life who graced the department with his presence for close to 50 years, and an equally generous colleague and friend.”

A native of Wilmington, Ohio, Gleason earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Dayton. He then worked briefly for the U.S. Air Force and as an eighth-grade teacher before coming to Notre Dame as a graduate student, earning master’s and doctoral degrees in history in 1955 and 1960, respectively.

Gleason joined the Notre Dame history faculty in 1959 and chaired the department from 1971 to 1974. He was the author of numerous journal articles and books, including what the ACHA called his “magnus opus,” “Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the 20th Century.” Other books included “The Conservative Reformers: German-American Catholics and the Social Order,” “Catholicism in America” and “Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism Past and Present.” He chaired the Catholic Commission on Intellectual and Cultural Affairs from 1986 to 1988, and Notre Dame’s history department presents an award in his name, the Philip Gleason Prize for the best published article by a graduate student.

As department chair, Gleason actively supported the work of his colleagues, including the creation by Professor Jay Dolan of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, whose programming Gleason enriched by his regular participation through the years.

In addition to his ACHA honor, Gleason received an honorary degree from Dayton, as well as its Marianist Award, honorary degrees from Marquette and Loyola University in Chicago, and the Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Award from the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.

Notre Dame has since 1883 annually presented the Laetare Medal to a Catholic “whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the Church, and enriched the heritage of humanity.” Past recipients include President John F. Kennedy, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, actresses Irene Dunne and Helen Hayes, jazz musician Dave Brubeck, and actor and activist Martin Sheen. It is Notre Dame’s highest honor and considered the most prestigious award accorded American Catholics.

The Laetare Medal has rarely been given to a member of the Notre Dame community. In 1999, Gleason was one of the exceptions. The citation honoring him read in part: “As the magisterial historian of American Catholic higher education, you have set a rigorous standard of faith-inspired scholarship; as an interpreter of American ethnicity, immigration, intellectual, and social history, you have won the praise of historians through Europe and the U.S.; for your insights into the assimilation of diverse peoples into a truly national community, (and) as a professor and alumnus of our University, you have earned and enjoyed the love of your students and colleagues and classmates.”

Gleason is survived by his wife, Maureen; four children, each a graduate of Notre Dame, Ann (Rick Regan), Dan (Susan Ansell Gleason), Margaret (Pat Loftus), and Philip (Renee Monson); and five grandchildren.

A Mass of Christian burial will be celebrated at 2:30 p.m. Thursday (Jan. 25) at Notre Dame’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

Originally published by Dennis Brown at news.nd.edu on January 20, 2024.

There’s learning from books and learning from immersive experiences. And last summer, Alyssa Miulli did the latter.

During an internship in Canada with the Smithsonian Institute, the University of Notre Dame history and anthropology major excavated 500-year-old artifacts of Basque mariners from France and Spain who built camps on an island while they hunted whales.

“Carbon dating of wood planks can give insight into a specific time range for whale hunting, the structure of the site may show what components of life were on land versus on the whaling vessels, and artifacts — such as leather shoes, a stone wall, and painted ceramics — can give a glimpse into domestic life,” Miulli said.

In addition to unearthing and inventorying roof tiles, flint, and cooking pots in Bonne-Espérance, Quebec, the junior immersed herself in the culture by eating seal meat, befriending locals, and making a short film about the region.

“For me, anthropology brings a distinctly human side to history,” said the Glynn Family Honors Program scholar.

Exhausting, precise, and rewarding

Miulli fell in love with anthropology during her University Seminar — Human Impact and the Environment: Past, Present & Future, taught by associate professor Donna Glowacki.

In the first-year class, she was encouraged to think deeply about anthropology in relation to the environment. She also appreciated Glowacki’s support during the Snite Museum of Art’s annual essay competition — which she won with “A Boy with Burdens: Analyzing Themes of Colonialism and Environmentalism in the Art of Yinka Shonibare.”

Eric Haanstad, associate professor of the practice and director of undergraduate studies in anthropology, pointed the president of the student-run Anthropology Club toward the summer internship led by Smithsonian senior scientist Bill Fitzhugh.

For more than 40 years, Fitzhugh has studied Arctic peoples and cultures. He previously excavated sites of Indigenous Innu and Inuit peoples on Quebec’s Lower North Shore, and Miulli was fascinated with his application of cross-cultural lenses to archaeology.

“I applied to this internship to see how the Innu, Inuit, and Basque cultures may have collided and influenced each other's way of life,” Miulli said.

Coming to appreciate the value of archaeological work was her favorite part of the experience. The team sometimes needed as many as three days to dig a 2-meter-by-1-meter unit, after which they inventoried artifacts and did a scale drawing for documentation.

“To put it plainly, archaeology is not easy. It is physically exhausting, tedious, and precise,” she said. 

“However, it is rewarding to know that attention to detail and care for your work are essential. Every small action matters to formulate a better understanding of the culture and time period that the artifacts represent.”

Crowberry bushes and sandy beaches

The West Chicago native described the fog-shrouded Canadian island landscape as almost otherworldly.

“While St. Paul River [on the mainland] had rolling rock formations and sandy beaches, Bonne-Espérance was covered in a thick layer of moss with crowberry bushes and bakeapple plants ripening up for harvest season,” she said.

Each morning, a resident family of minks greeted the researchers when they arrived by boat; the team stayed nights in St. Paul River, about 4 miles away on the mainland.

People in St. Paul River also warmly welcomed the researchers. Locals invited them to engage with the culture, including eating at a restaurant where mummers — actors wearing disguises — performed.

Miulli enjoyed regional delicacies such as bakeapple cheesecake, seal meat, and fisherman’s brewis, which is made with salted cod fish, hard bread, onions, and scrunchions.

Late into the internship, officials with the Whiteley Museum of St. Paul River — which hosted the team — requested that it make a film about the dig and the region.

So Miulli — an actor, assistant director, and social media coordinator with Notre Dame’s Not-So-Royal-Shakespeare Co. — took action.

With creative freedom, an iPhone, and three weeks’ time, she interviewed Fitzhugh and locals and shot b-roll for the film.

“A small project for the Whiteley Museum turned into a passion project that acted as a catalyst for what I hope to do in the future with anthropology and film,” Miulli said. “Interviews and ethnographic films are the most valuable resources to produce in order to represent subcultures that may be overlooked in our rapidly changing world.”

How it started, how it’s going

Miulli has also studied other cultures and areas of the world during her undergraduate career.

She has assisted Glowacki with The Far View Archeological Project — a collaboration between Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado and Notre Dame that examines ancestral Puebloan villages.

And, she’s helped anthropology professor Susan Blum with the School Stories Lab, which gathers accounts from people worldwide about their “joys and fears, triumphs and shame, friendships and loneliness, curiosity and boredom, and everything else that accompanies the experience of school.”

During the fall semester, Miulli studied abroad at St. Andrews University in Scotland.

The first-generation college student chose St. Andrews for its exceptional academic culture that prioritizes individual humanities research, as well as its extensive musical theater community.

Miulli said she didn’t choose Notre Dame, though. It was more like the University chose her.

“Notre Dame provided everything that I wanted in my future: faith, community, academic rigor, and endless opportunity,” said Miulli, who plans to pursue a Ph.D.

“I am grateful every day to call the Golden Dome my home.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on December 13, 2023.

(1) The John Highbarger Memorial Award for the best doctoral dissertation

Istvan (Van) Szepesi ’23 (5+1 postdoctoral fellow at Notre Dame), “Unspoken Accommodations: A Century of Religious Coexistence in Cologne, 1517–1617”

“Istvan Szepesi’s dissertation is an outstanding piece of historical research and analysis. Drawing on scholarship in English, German, French, and Dutch, and manuscript sources in Latin and 16th century Rhenish dialect, it studies inter-confessional relations in the city of
Cologne in the long period from the Reformation to the Thirty Years War. Why, in an era notorious for religious violence, did the city’s Catholic authorities tolerate a Protestant minority in their midst? Eschewing monocausal explanations, the dissertation reconstructs the diversity of factors involved, from class conflicts and commercial and strategic interests to personal relationships that crossed religious boundaries and some individuals’ genuine belief in toleration. The dissertation avoids the pitfall of determinism, instead remaining alive to the choices that the historical actors faced in their own time. While anchored in the world of the 16th century, Szepesi’s work holds lessons for the present as well, for it explores timeless challenges of tolerance and pluralism that confront any diverse, conflict- ridden society.”

(2) The Philip Gleason Prize for the best published article

Jorge Puma Crespo ’23 (assistant professor of history, Hope College), “The Nazas-Aguanaval Group: Radical Priests, Catholic Networks, and Maoist Politics in Northern Mexico,” The Americas 79, no. 2 (April 2022): 291–320.

“In the years after the close of the Second Vatican Council, a group of progressive priests in northern Mexico worked with Maoist activists in order to help students and squatters find housing and receive basic services. The scholarship on this phenomenon has treated these coalitions as flash points for the development of liberation theology, and credited their organization to left-wing bishops. In this exhaustively researched and beautifully written article, Jorge Puma sees instead the Nazas-Aguanaval group as part of a grass-roots movement in which progressive priests played a leading role. In this popular movement, religion was never absent, but it was also not at the core of its organization. The priests, animated by the ideals of the Second Vatican Council, carved out a space for dialogue and cooperation with Marxists in the service of helping the poor. As Puma shows, the motive energy in this movement came from the ground up rather than from the Church hierarchy. His article makes a significant historiographic intervention as part of a larger effort to decenter the study of progressive Catholics from bishops and theologians.”

(3) The Vincent P. DeSantis Prize for the best unpublished paper

Gavin Moulton, “From Church Riot to Sit-Down Strike: Polish Catholics and Collective Action in South Bend, 1885-1940”

“This paper uses the small case of two Catholic parishes in South Bend to tell a big story about the transformation of America from the Gilded Age to the New Deal. Drawing on a wide range of published and archival sources in English and Polish, supplementing the study of textual documents with analyses of art and architecture, and engaging with the historiography of immigration, labor, and religion, ‘From Church Riot to Sit-Down Strike’ shows how the experience of Catholic parish life helped turn 19th century Polish peasant immigrants into 20th century American labor activists. Deeply researched and vigorously narrated, this paper is an impressive piece of historical scholarship.”

Rising 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 School of Art and the University of Strathclyde in Scotland.

The history major, member of the Glynn Family Honors Program, and Latino Studies Scholar in the Institute for Latino Studies 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 long-time 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.”

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

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 Studies’ 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 Studies Scholars Program and the Institute for Latino Studies 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 Studies 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, 2023.

Membership in the RIA is the highest academic honor in Ireland. Members are elected in recognition of their academic contributions to the sciences, humanities and social sciences, as well as to public service. Griffin was one of 28 newly elected members and was recognized for his work on revolution and rebellion, migration, colonization and violence in North America. 

Griffin was also chosen for his leadership and chairmanship of the Analyzing and Researching Ireland, North and South (ARINS) project, a joint initiative between RIA and Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute that brings together leading experts from Ireland and abroad to examine policy issues affecting the entire island of Ireland in the post-Brexit era. 

“I am so gratified to be recognized by one of the leading learned societies in the world,” Griffin said. “To be named as one of a small number of honorary members, and as an American who studies the United States, makes my election all that more meaningful.”

Griffin, who is a faculty fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, earned a doctorate in American history at Northwestern University and taught at the University of Virginia before joining Notre Dame in 2008. His expertise lies in the intersection of colonial America and early modern Irish and British history, and the ways in which all three countries differed and were linked during the 17th and 18th centuries. 

“Patrick Griffin is the rare scholar who combines impressive erudition, command of the modern histories of three North Atlantic countries, profound insight into contemporary Irish politics and the ability to influence a wide array of publics through his eloquence and openness to dialogue,” said R. Scott Appleby, the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs. “The Royal Irish Academy, in recognizing these marks of distinction, has honored not only Professor Griffin but also the University of Notre Dame.” 

For the 2021-22 academic year, Griffin was named the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford, and in 2018 had the distinction of honorary professor conferred on him from the University of Edinburgh.

Griffin’s single-authored books include “The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World” (2023); “The Townshend Moment: The Making of Empire and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century” (2017); “America’s Revolution” (2012); “American Leviathan: Empire, Nation and Revolutionary Frontier” (2007); and “The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish and the Creation of a British Atlantic World” (2001). 

The RIA, which was founded in 1785, is Ireland’s leading body of experts who support and promote the sciences and humanities. A forum of peer-elected experts, the academy seeks to make significant contributions to public debate and policy formation on issues in culture, technology and science by leading national research projects, particularly those highlighting Ireland and its heritage. 

The RIA draws its membership from the whole island of Ireland, both north and south, with a small number of honorary members being elected each year who have made major international efforts on behalf of their disciplines but who are not residents of Ireland. RIA members assist by providing expert advice as well as representing and promoting the academy and its mission globally.   

“These individuals, elected by their peers, have made exceptional contributions in their fields of endeavor,” said Pat Guiry, president of RIA. “We are delighted to recognize their achievements. As members of the academy, they will support the RIA by engaging and leading in activities that strengthen the international recognition of the academy’s scholarship and serve the public good through their knowledge and insight.”

Griffin joins a cohort of 670 other academy members, 95 of whom are honorary members, with several past members including Nobel Laureates such as W.B. Yeats, Ernest Walton, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Bob Grubbs and Seamus Heaney.

The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies is a teaching and research institute dedicated to the study and understanding of Irish culture in all of its manifestations — not only in Ireland but around the world. The institute offers undergraduate- and graduate-level minors in Irish studies; wide-ranging courses in Irish language, literature, politics, culture, history and music; lectures, readings and performances given by scholars, poets and musicians; archeological digs in Western Ireland; and the summer IRISH Seminar, in which graduate students from Notre Dame and other universities engage with key figures in Irish cultural, intellectual and political life. 

In 1996, the institute — along with Notre Dame International — established a presence in Ireland with the creation of Newman House in Dublin and, later on, O’Connell House, both of which serve Notre Dame undergraduates in joint programs with Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and Dublin City University. 

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, assistant director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Tracy DeStazio at news.nd.edu on May 31, 2023.