Robert Sullivan

Biography

Robert Sullivan was ordained a Catholic priest in 1980. His academic interest is the interaction of Christianity and some of its modern surrogates in the north Atlantic world—what is sometimes called belief and unbelief. He is the author of John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Harvard University Press, 1982) and Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power (Belknap Press—Harvard University Press, 2009) and is now working on a book provisionally titled First Simplify, Then Exaggerate: A Biography of Economic Man. The subject is the triumph and overreach of thinking economically and imagining the scope of economic agency, rather than ethically or politically, in north Atlantic culture since the end of the Middles Ages. Particularly, the book will explore how the creation of a monetized and increasingly globalized economy compromised, baffled, or repurposed efforts to define ethical standards to regulate it. It is a story of encroachment provoking resistance, notably by Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham. The triumph has been especially conspicuous in the United States, supported by growing confidence in the sufficiency of sophisticated mathematical calculation and projection to supply expanding institutions, both private and public, not only with knowledge but also with predicative power. It offers, therefore, a chapter in the history of American exceptionalism.

At Notre Dame, Sullivan served in administration from 1998 into 2025, most recently as associate vice president for academic mission support.