Kathleen Sprows Cummings

Kathleen Sprows Cummings is the John A. O’Brien Collegiate Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also a concurrent faculty member in Gender Studies and Italian Studies. She is also a fellow of the Keough Institute for Irish Studies and the Ansari Institute for Global Religious Engagement. She also serves as the Director of the Provost Office’s Global Catholic Research Initiative.

 

Cummings most recent book is Holy Women Making History, published in spring 2026 by Paulist Press. She is also the author of A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019. She published her first book, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era, with the University of North Carolina Press in 2009. She co-edited (with R. Scott Appleby) Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History, published by Cornell University Press in 2012. She also co-edited, with Timothy Matovina and Robert Orsi, Catholics in the Vatican II Era: Local Histories of a Global Event, published in 2017 with Cambridge University Press. Cummings edited Roman Sources for the Study of American Catholicism, 1763–1939, a guide to 59 archival repositories in Rome and at the Holy See, written by Matteo Binasco and published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2018. She served as the president of the American Catholic Historical Association in 2017, and was the director of the Cushwa Center from 2012 to 2023.

 

Cummings teaches classes on the history of global Catholicism, women and gender, sanctity, and American religion. She received the College of Arts and Letters Sheedy Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2021 and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Conference on the History of Women Religious in 2025. A papal analyst for NBC/MSNBC, Cummings recently offered expert commentary during the 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. She is frequently quoted in multiple media outlets on a variety of Catholic subjects.

 

Cummings served on the Board of Trustees at the University of Scranton from 2019 to 2025. She currently serves on the Board of Directors at the National Shrine of St. Frances Cabrini in Chicago, Illinois.

 

Cummings is currently writing a history of the globalization and modernization of the canonization process, tentatively titled Naming Saints in the Global Church.