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Three Notre Dame researchers win NEH grants for humanities-based projects

2025-08-06T15:30:00-04:00

Three University of Notre Dame researchers have been awarded significant three-year grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of work related to the archeological aspects of Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, contextualizing Catholic resistance in 20th-century central and eastern Europe, and the use of virtue ethics in generative artificial intelligence systems.

David Hernandez, the Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Associate Professor of Classics, and Morgan Munsen, senior research and partnerships program manager at the Nanovic Institute for European 91��Ƶ in the Keough 91��Ƶ of Global Affairs, have each won an NEH Collaborative Research grant. Thomas A. Stapleford, associate professor in the Program of Liberal 91��Ƶ, is leading a team that has been awarded a Humanities Research Center on Artificial Intelligence grant.

The Notre Dame awards are among $34.79 million in grants announced by the NEH in August to support 97 humanities projects across the country.

“We are immensely proud of these Notre Dame scholars for receiving this federal funding to support their work on critical topics,” said Jeffrey F. Rhoads, the John and Catherine Martin Family Vice President for Research.“This financial support is a testament to the exceptional caliber of humanities scholarship done here, and it will enable these researchers to enrich public understanding and contribute to the vibrant intellectual life of our nation.”

Digging for more

Left: David Hernandez, the Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Associate Professor of Classics with a student at the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. Right: Paolo Vitti, an associate professor of the practice at the 91��Ƶ of Architecture. (Photos provided.)

Built in second-century Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo was initially created as a mausoleum for the Roman emperor Hadrian and his family — making it one of the most notable tombs in the world. Over the centuries, the towering rotunda was used as a fortress and residence for medieval Roman Catholic popes, and today, it serves as a museum that welcomes more than a million tourists each year.

But Hernandez, a classical archeologist, says little research has been conducted on the building itself.

“New studies demonstrate that major aspects of its original architecture are presently misunderstood, including its design, display and intended symbolism,” Hernandez said.

Together with Paolo Vitti, an associate professor of the practice at the 91��Ƶ of Architecture, Hernandez will use the NEH grant to create a two-volume book, tentatively titled “The Mausoleum of Hadrian and Castel Sant’Angelo: The Tomb and its Afterlife,” that will serve as the first comprehensive interpretation of the landmark site. They will also create a 3-D digital model of the monument that will be available for the public.

“With this grant, we’re able to undertake on-site fieldwork over the course of three years and publish a comprehensive study of the archaeology, architecture and history of Castel Sant’Angelo, one of the most significant and iconic monuments located in the heart of Rome,” Hernandez said. “I am deeply honored and immensely grateful to receive this research support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.”

A ‘view from below’

Morgan Munsen, senior research and partnerships program manager at the Nanovic Institute for European 91��Ƶ.

In the aftermath of World War II, central and eastern Europe was significantly shaped by communist government repression of many forms of expression, including religion. With her NEH grant, Munsen is aiming to shine a light on and humanize those everyday Catholics who were devoted to resisting these restrictions during the 20th-century period.

Munsen’s research project, Contextualizing and Personalizing the Diversity of Catholic Resistance to Communist Religious Oppression in Central and Eastern Europe (1944 to 1991), will come to life through the creation of a multimedia website. The site will feature digital storytelling through embedded video clips from eyewitness interviews, as well as provide historical and political context to accounts from that time period.

“Rather than reiterating state-centered narratives, this precious corpus of interviews provides a ‘view from below,’ foregrounding the lived experiences of individuals and communities who were often marginalized in official histories,” said Munsen, who earned her bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and behavior and her Ph.D. in psychology at Notre Dame.

By showcasing voices across several countries and cultures, including Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, Slovakia and Croatia, the project will highlight the rich diversity in how various religious communities navigated communist dominance. Munsen said she hopes the project will expand scholarly discourse on how religious individuals navigate and challenge totalitarian regimes.

Her research will draw from and highlight the Nanovic Institute's long-standing Catholic Universities Partnership, and connections with Ukrainian Catholic University’s Institute of Church History, in particular, will significantly advance the aspirations of the new Ukrainian 91��Ƶ Hub.

“I’m perhaps most excited about the collaborative nature of this project, which convenes an international and multidisciplinary group of scholars alongside specialists in digital interactive media and archival systems,” Munsen said.

Keeping the human in humanities with AI

Thomas Stapleford, associate professor in the Program of Liberal 91��Ƶ.

With the rapid progression and integration of artificial intelligence in everyday life, leading technology and humanities scholars at Notre Dame are aiming to explore how to enhance and emphasize humanity in the creation of generative AI systems.

Led by Stapleford, the Notre Dame Program on AI and the Development of Ethics in Agents (ND-PAIDEIA) will gather a network of multidisciplinary researchers to think collectively about how to best cultivate human flourishing amidst the emergence of powerful AI systems. The group will focus on generative AI in relation to two central themes: citizenship and justice, and creativity and human judgment.

“Together, these themes address two distinctively human capabilities: our political life in community — with its aspiration to be governed by reasoned discussions of justice — and our capacity to develop, evaluate and choose our own goals or ends,” Stapleford said. “Generative AI systems have the potential to enhance or diminish both of these capabilities.”

The idea for the program stems from an initial workshop at Notre Dame organized by Stapleford and assistant teaching professor Patrick Gamez in their Generative AI Research Innovation Collaborative, which was a part of the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good’s inaugural Research Innovation Collaboratives.

The NEH grant will help the group continue their research and allow ND-PAIDEIA to draft guidelines for using virtue ethics in developing and implementing generative AI systems. They plan to then test and refine the guidelines through various projects and events such as hosting research seminars, offering workshops, involving undergraduates through a hackathon event, running an annual conference, authoring papers and hosting bootcamps on virtue ethics and generative AI. The team also intends to build the foundation for ND-PAIDEIA to become a permanent program at Notre Dame.

ND-PAIDEIA involves collaboration between the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society and the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, along with additional support from the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures and the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. The application was also supported by the city of South Bend’s Department of Innovation and Technology, which will work with ND-PAIDEIA on some of its future activities.

“ND-PAIDEIA is dedicated to using insights from the humanities to help us design and use generative AI systems in ways that strengthen, rather than weaken, those core aspects of what it means to be human,” Stapleford said.

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on August 05, 2025.

In memoriam: Karl Ameriks, the McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy Emeritus

2025-05-06T15:00:00-04:00

Karl Ameriks, the McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy Emeritus (Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame)

Karl Ameriks, the McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, died on April 28 from pancreatic cancer. He was 77.

Born in post-World War II Germany, Ameriks’ family emigrated to the United States when he was a child, and he grew up in Detroit, Michigan. He received his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from Yale University. He came to the Department of Philosophy at Notre Dame in 1973 during a formative time for the department, which had transitioned from a predominantly Thomist focus to the more analytical American philosophy in the 1960s.

“He joined the department at a time that was crucial to setting us on the path we’ve followed since,” said Paul Weithman, the Glynn Family Honors Professor of Philosophy and former chair of the department. “Any department would have been lucky to have him, but he was very happy here, and we were all much the better for it.”

During his 43-year career at Notre Dame, Ameriks predominantly focused on the history of modern philosophy, continental philosophy and modern German philosophy. He dedicated much of his research to 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, about whom he has published multiple books, such as “Kant’s Moral and Legal Philosophy,” “Kant and the Historical Turn” and “Reinhold: Letters on the Kantian Philosophy.” He continued to actively research after his retirement in 2016, publishing books including “Kantian Dignity and its Difficulties” and “Kantian Subjects: Critical Philosophy and Late Modernity.”

Ameriks, his colleagues said, was a world-renowned scholar of Kant and German idealism — but also possessed a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity with boundless insight.

“He seemed to know everything about everyone in the history of philosophy, in politics, in literature, in history,” said Samuel Newlands, the Carl E. Koch Professor of Philosophy and chair of the department. “To have a conversation with him about any topic was a bracing, thrilling journey — you never quite knew where it was going, but you could be confident that it would be full of dry, sly humor, sharp insight and unexpected twists and turns.”

In 2009, Ameriks was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A characteristically modest man, he deflected self-lauding remarks about this prestigious recognition by pointing to colleagues who received the distinction before him, saying he was merely pleased to “receive an honor that has come to others at Notre Dame who have always been quite an inspiration for me.”

In addition to his impressive scholarship, Ameriks was also personable. He was a beloved mentor for many graduate students, and he always prioritized time with family and friends. Colleagues described him as a bibliophile and a “scholar’s scholar” who constantly engaged in invigorating discussions.

“He was generous and gentle, always encouraging, and he was someone whose daily presence in Malloy Hall was a source of joy and delight for everyone who encountered him,” Newlands said. “He will be sorely missed.”

Ameriks is preceded in death by his parents and a brother. He is survived by his wife, Geraldine, an emerita associate teaching professor of Spanish at Notre Dame; two sons; three grandchildren; and his brother, John.

A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. May 31 at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, 1021 Manchester Drive, South Bend. Memorial contributions may be made in Amerik’s honor to the American Cancer Society, the Northern Food Bank of Indiana and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on May 05, 2025.

Legacy in preservation: Notre Dame safeguards irreplaceable manuscripts

2025-02-20T10:35:00-05:00

How a relationship born out of the Cold War made the Hesburgh Libraries an essential destination for medieval research

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.

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Four Arts & Letters faculty continue Notre Dame’s record NEH fellowship success

2025-01-24T15:00:00-05:00

Arts & Letters faculty won NEH fellowships for projects that will examine the history of Kurdish music and media, rethink Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical approach, unveil how the Catholic Church handled marital violence and separation in the 18th century, and further understand the cultural impact of Hurricane Maria. (Photo by Jon L. Hendricks/University of Notre Dame)

Four faculty members in the College of Arts & Letters have won National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, extending the University of Notre Dame’s record success with the federal agency committed to supporting original research and scholarship.

Jon Bullock, an assistant professor in the Department of Music; Therese Cory, the John and Jean Oesterle Associate Professor of Thomistic 91��Ƶ in the Department of Philosophy; Ulrich Lehner, the William K. Warren Foundation Professor in the Department of Theology; and Marisel Moreno, a professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, are among the 78 scholars offered the prestigious fellowships, which were announced Jan. 14.

Notre Dame and Johns Hopkins University were the only institutions to have four faculty win individual NEH fellowships this year, and Notre Dame faculty have won more NEH fellowships than any other private university in the country since 2000. Notre Dame’s success has been driven in large part due to faculty research support provided by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

“I am delighted that the NEH has once again recognized the exceptional research projects our faculty are pursuing,” said Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters. “These four awards underscore the high caliber of diverse scholarship across our disciplines and invaluable guidance offered by ISLA throughout the fellowship application process.”

Connecting Kurdish music, media and culture

Jon Bullock, an assistant professor in the Department of Music.

For the past decade, Bullock has been conducting research on Kurdish music and broadcasting, a long-established but underexplored area of global culture.

Kurds are an ethnic group that predominantly span across Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria and have faced varying degrees of linguistic, cultural and political oppression. Because of this history, and because they have no nation-state of their own, Bullock said relatively little research has been done on Kurdish art and media.

In his book project, tentatively titled “Kurdish Broadcasting and the Power of Music on Air,” Bullock hopes to provide a historical overview of Kurdish music on the radio and analyze how its impact on Kurdish society helps scholars of music and media think more deeply about the power of music broadcasting as a whole.

“It’s not just trying to piece together a music history over the last 100 years among the Kurds,” Bullock said. “But also showing that music and media are intertwined and how that can lead to new perspectives on the affordances of music broadcasting, maybe in ways that we haven’t heard before.”

As an ethnomusicologist, Bullock was initially interested in the varying styles of Kurdish music that he describes as a “mosaic of related musical practices.” That led to him discovering the importance of radio broadcasting and understanding where and when the music was shared and what messages were being transmitted, especially during times of geopolitical fluctuation.

Through his work, Bullock hopes to show that the history of Kurdish media can ultimately help to contextualize the present moment of political uncertainty.

An essential part of the project, Bullock said, is centering Kurds in global narratives that shape and define the region.

“This is not just about how we paint a picture of Kurdish music as something unique — it’s about how this helps us to understand how Kurds see themselves in relation to the rest of the world at any given moment,” he said.

Over the past several years, Bullock has completed archival and ethnographic research in Kurdistan, reviewed radio programming and station records and interviewed former employees who worked for Kurdish radio stations. Now, in his second year at Notre Dame and with support from the NEH, he will be able to complete his project fully.

“It’s been a very long journey of trying to just find things,” he said. “So when I heard I received the fellowship, I was shocked, surprised and, of course, super grateful.”

Contextualizing Aquinas’ philosophical approach

Therese Cory, the John and Jean Oesterle Associate Professor of Thomistic 91��Ƶ in the Department of Philosophy.

Cory, who studies medieval philosophy, is currently working on a large project that aims to challenge how scholars consider the mind of the great Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas.

The director of the Jacques Maritain Center and its associated History of Philosophy Forum, Cory focuses her research on mind, self-consciousness, personhood and the nature of knowing. She is particularly interested in Aquinas’ systematic approach to such topics.

The first portion of her current project is her tentatively titled book “Thinking as Being in Aquinas: Aquinas's Metaphysics of Mind,” which will examine the nature of the mind according to Aquinas. The NEH fellowship will help support a second book and final portion of the project, tentatively titled “Aquinas’ Mind-in-World.” In it, Cory will build off her understanding of Aquinas’ mind and examine how he understands intentionality, or the mind’s ability to enter into relationships with things outside itself.

To do so is intrinsically human, she said, but also something shared with other animals, and Aquinas considered intentionality to be the mind’s way of making itself part of the real world. While watching a football game, for example, a person in the crowd may imagine what it may be like to be a player on the field to better understand the game scenario. In doing so, Aquinas contended, that person also becomes a part of the game.

“We’re part of the world, too — we’re not just spectators,” Cory said. “That’s a really important insight, and it’s something that brings Aquinas closer to non-Western philosophies and Indigenous views that we would often not associate him with at all.”

In her research process, Cory aims to read and understand Aquinas through the historical context in which he lived. She contends that present-day thinkers have often erroneously read Aquinas’ theory of mind through the lens of modern philosophies, whose questions can be very different from his own. In her current project, Cory aims to fundamentally change and correct how scholars interpret his teachings.

“I’m arguing that’s been a huge mistake,” she said. “He really thinks about the mind in a fundamentally different way — he’s not asking those questions. So I’m trying to take the theory off that track and put it on a different track.”

Examining sexualized violence in early modern Catholicism

Ulrich Lehner, the William K. Warren Foundation Professor in the Department of Theology.

Lehner, a scholar of religious history and theology of the early modern era, is currently pursuing a project called “Bodies in Court,” which explores how Catholics from 1700 to 1800 confronted marital violence and separation. It highlights the intersections of sexualized violence, power dynamics, legal assessments and religious values in Catholic regions of central Europe.

Lehner will examine ecclesiastical court records from Austrian, Swiss, German, and Czech archives — areas he is already familiar with from research he did for his previous book, “Staged Chastity: Sexual Offenses in the Society of Jesus in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” (De Gruyter, 2023), which ultimately led to his current project.

“When I researched the history of sexual abuse among clergymen, I stumbled in the archives upon accounts of marital violence that had been adjudicated before ecclesiastical judges,” he said. “When I decided to read them, I was amazed by how detailed they were. They gave me a glimpse into the intimate lives of people who died centuries ago.”

Lehner was surprised to find accounts of women bravely speaking up about the abuse they suffered and the physical and emotional toll it took on them.

Because sexual violence is a relatively new area of research for historians, Lehner said, there is little known about how Catholics handled this issue. He hopes his project will shed more light on this gap in historical knowledge.

“It will not only provide new insights into the construction of views of body and sexuality, but also analyze the legal and theological background of sexualized violence, thus bringing a new aspect of history to light,” Ulrich wrote in his proposal. “This overlooked area of research promises to overturn many assumptions in standard narratives and contribute to the societal discussion about the abuse of power and its concealment in ecclesiastical contexts.”

Amplifying cultural expression after a disaster

Marisel Moreno, a professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in Sept. 2017, leaving the U.S. territory reeling from its aftermath that can still be felt today.

The following spring, in partnership with the University of Michigan, Moreno, whose area of expertise is U.S. Latinx literature, and Spanish professor Tom Anderson, led and co-produced an online course and created the multimedia project “Listening to Puerto Rico,” in which they interviewed Puerto Ricans about the immediate impact of the Category 4 hurricane’s destruction.

“As a Puerto Rican born and raised in the archipelago but who has been living stateside for decades, I am one of the millions of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora who witnessed, from afar, the destruction of our homeland,” she said. “There were limited ways to help immediately following the hurricane, but in spring 2018 a unique opportunity arose to create awareness about Puerto Rico and the impact of the storm.”

Deriving inspiration from those interviews, Moreno is now focusing on her NEH-supported project, tentatively titled “Eye of the Storm: Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rican Cultural Production.” The book will focus on Puerto Rican literary and cultural expressions post-Maria, and Moreno said those aspects play a “crucial role by providing a counter-narrative to the dehumanizing rhetoric of the local and federal governments.”

“By examining the representation of the hurricane’s impact in literature and other art forms, I aim to untangle the links between colonialism, anti-Blackness, disaster capitalism, climate change and migration,” she said. “It has been more than seven years since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, yet much of the archipelago is still experiencing the consequences of the storm — or what I call the ‘afterlives of disaster.’”

Puerto Rican cultural production, Moreno contends in her project, resists the colonial violence that reproduces the afterlives of disaster by being life-affirming and a testament to the survival of the Puerto Rican people.

This project, Moreno said, can also shed light on how cultural creation can uplift resistance to colonial violence and help imagine a decolonial future, especially for communities in the Global South. She also believes this is especially topical as vulnerable communities of color face challenges in light of globalization and climate change.

“I am extremely grateful to everyone who has supported me,” she said. “Winning this fellowship has given me a renewed sense of confidence in this project, which is very close to my heart.”

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on January 22, 2025.

College of Arts & Letters launches ND Population Analytics to accelerate policy-relevant work through big data

2024-12-12T09:00:00-05:00

In partnership with the University of Notre Dame’s Poverty Initiative, the College of Arts & Letters has launched a data-focused research effort that will foster and advance multidisciplinary work on a wide range of pressing demographic issues facing society, including poverty, rising inequality, declining health in the United States, family instability and falling religious participation.

Notre Dame Population Analytics (ND Pop) will catalyze policy-relevant research by creating an ecosystem of scholars on campus who strive to tackle important population-level issues in their work. Led by William Evans, the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Economics and co-founder of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, ND Pop will be a hiring and convening force for innovative social scientists, empowering them with access to curated datasets, specialized staff and research associates, and other essential support services.

William Evans (Photo by Barbara Johnston/University of Notre Dame)

“Many of the problems facing the U.S. and other nations are demographic issues — the aging of the population, declining fertility, heavy concentration of the opioid crisis in at-risk populations and disparities in education outcomes across groups,” Evans said. “Driven by its Catholic mission, Notre Dame is uniquely positioned to provide a voice on these key issues.”

By leveraging the tools of data science, ND Pop aims to promote human flourishing through producing impactful research that can inform policy and practice.

“One of the most exciting aspects about this work is taking research beyond the academy and making it more actionable,” Evans said. “Accessing big data will help us understand the dynamics of these key issues. We will be able to leverage the growing infrastructure at Notre Dame to create a lasting impact by informing policymakers, educators, health care providers, social service workers and others.”

Through partnerships with Notre Dame Research, the Center for Research Computing and the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, ND Pop will aim to establish a Federal Statistical Research Data Center (RDC), which would bring a secure research environment to campus for social science researchers to responsibly access sensitive data.

ND Pop has also quickly built up staff support for population research, hiring a project manager, a partnership program manager and three predoctoral research associates. ND Pop’s partnership program manager, in partnership with Notre Dame Research, will assist with grant proposals to ensure faculty have the resources to capitalize on prestigious funding opportunities and improve the efficiency of the grant application process.

Jeffrey F. Rhoads (Photo by University of Notre Dame)

“Notre Dame has long been a driving force behind some of the most significant research on poverty,” said Jeffrey F. Rhoads, vice president for research and professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. “Notre Dame Research is proud to partner with ND Pop to further enhance that strength by connecting it with the University’s expanding capabilities in advanced data and computational science.”

ND Pop’s three predocs work with faculty across the sociology, psychology and economics departments to run the day-to-day operation of research projects and handle tasks such as coding, data cleaning and constructing data-sharing agreements. The predocs currently provide support for research that examines socioemotional outcomes for families who have experienced intimate partner violence, data on gender differences in child care, and the Census Tree dataset that uses machine learning models to link historical U.S. Census records.

With initial funding from the Poverty Initiative, ND Pop has begun supporting current faculty research and hiring. ND Pop is partnering with the Keough 91��Ƶ of Global Affairs to support new faculty positions for preeminent scholars working at the intersection of migration and poverty, and it plans to be actively involved in attracting talented faculty in areas of research such as history, health and aging.

“To maximize the potential for ND Pop, we need broader representation of faculty with these skills across the social sciences,” Evans said. “The investments in research infrastructure will not only make current faculty more productive, but they will make Notre Dame an attractive destination for scholars in population analytics.”

Steven Alvarado (Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame)

Steven Alvarado, an associate professor of sociology, is working with a predoctoral research assistant to gather information from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for a project regarding spatial inequality. His team is also accessing and dissecting data from the Indiana Department of Education for a project that examines the presence of weapons in K-12 schools and its impact on students’ education.

Having access to statistical population data, Alvarado said, is essential for his research on understanding the causes and effects of inequality.

“This is the type of research that Notre Dame can really make its mark on,” Alvarado said. “Through the development and infusion of efforts into expanding a population research science center, it can almost instantaneously elevate the national research profile of not only the social sciences at Notre Dame, but the University as a whole.”

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

Economist Kirk Doran wins UK’s Panmure House Prize honoring interdisciplinary research

2024-10-11T08:00:00-04:00

Kirk Doran, an associate professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame.

Kirk Doran, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, has won the 2024 Adam Smith Panmure House Prize.

Established in 2021, the prize is named after the forefather of economics and celebrates those who embody his empiricism and long-term interdisciplinary thinking in their research. One of the United Kingdom’s largest academic prizes open to researchers globally, it has been awarded to emerging academic leaders across multiple disciplines, including a business academic, a neurologist and an anthropologist.

“I feel honored and privileged to win the Panmure House Prize. Adam Smith has been an inspiration to me since the first time I began studying social structures and the economy as an undergraduate,” Doran said. “I am particularly inspired by the prize’s aim to explore the relationship between long-term thinking and radical innovation. This is exactly what our current incentive structures both within and outside academia under-incentivize, and that is why Panmure House’s work is so essential here.”

Like Smith, Doran asks fundamental questions that are often hard to find a definitive answer to because they are so overarching. In his research, Doran seeks to identify where and how new knowledge is created in order to ultimately find the cause of long-term per capita economic growth.

Through his subfield of innovation economics, Doran aims to use techniques developed by modern labor economists to answer questions that had been long debated without progress until these techniques were developed. He has applied empirical tactics to measure knowledge generation through bibliometric analysis of interdisciplinary databases — such as papers, patents and medical trials.

His studies find that the development of new knowledge is ultimately based on collaborative relationships in which people inspire and challenge one another.

“We are delighted to see Kirk Doran’s research receive this international recognition,” said John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost. “The Panmure House Prize’s emphasis on long-term, interdisciplinary thinking mirrors the University of Notre Dame’s commitment to scholarly innovation and excellence across the disciplines.”

Doran was one of four finalists from leading global institutions to be considered for the Panmure House Prize. He was supported in pursuing the award by the Office of the Provost and the College of Arts and Letters’ Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

With this recognition, Doran plans to continue examining how new knowledge impacts per capita economic growth with a multidisciplinary team. He hopes it will have a policy impact that can benefit productivity.

“I think my research will help to refocus our policy efforts regarding long-term economic growth to the encouragement of deep collaboration among innovative people,” he said. “It is not enough to better educate our workforce or even produce more entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors; such efforts could not possibly produce long-run economic growth unless these individuals enter periods of deep collaboration with each other in the joint production of knowledge.”

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on Oct. 7.

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

Six new faculty join psychology department to advance research on mental health, other disorders

2024-09-30T11:54:00-04:00

The Department of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame has hired six new faculty members this year, a significant expansion of a field that is core to the University’s commitment to fighting the U.S. mental health crisis.

The new assistant professors — Ryan Carpenter, Haya Fatimah, Kaylin Hill, Matthew Robison, Elizabeth Shewark and Ivan Vargas — will further research in their subfields of cognitive, behavioral, clinical and developmental psychology. Their scholarly work will aim to address the psychological causes and effects of various issues such as trauma, self-harm, sleep disorders and substance use disorder.

“The addition of six new faculty members to a single department in one year is a rare and transformative event,” said James Brockmole, professor of psychology and chair of the department. “By recruiting these outstanding young scholars to Notre Dame, we have significantly expanded the questions we can ask about a wide range of mental phenomena, the methods that we can use to derive answers to those questions, and the educational opportunities that we can offer to our undergraduate and graduate students.”

Four of the new faculty are clinical psychologists and will conduct research at the new Veldman Family Psychology Clinic, which broke ground at 501 N. Hill St. in South Bend’s East Bank neighborhood on Sept. 20 and is expected to be completed in 2026. The 36,000-square-foot facility is the first piece of Notre Dame’s $68 million commitment to improving mental health on campus, in the South Bend community and across the nation.

Once at full capacity, the clinic will serve more than 1,500 people in the South Bend community annually through mental health assessment, intervention and prevention services, and will be home to faculty and graduate students developing scalable, evidence-based solutions that address childhood trauma, substance use and other mental health concerns.

Understanding where substance use disorder begins

Ryan Carpenter

In his research, clinical psychologist Ryan Carpenter focuses on understanding substance use in the everyday lives of everyday people.

To examine alcohol and opioid use, Carpenter uses technologies such as smartphones and portable breathalyzers to understand what occurs in people’s lives that ultimately triggers their decision to imbibe in addictive substances. In his lab, he is also interested in testing if mobile health interventions, such as smartphone apps, can be helpful to people trying to address their substance use.

“To improve treatment options, there is a critical need to better understand why some people can use substances largely without issue, while others develop significant problems,” he said.

Carpenter, who was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University and most recently was an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, currently has two projects funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to develop and tailor behavioral interventions to address the co-use of alcohol and opioids in young adults and to help people who are drinking alcohol while in treatment for opioid use.

At Notre Dame, Carpenter said, he’s looking forward to collaborating with his colleagues and to making lasting relationships with South Bend community partners. He said the development of the Veldman Family Psychology Clinic will also provide critical infrastructure for both conducting substance use research and providing treatment services in the community.

“A major draw of Notre Dame for me is the opportunity to be around so many people studying so many important and interesting research questions,” he said. “It’s energizing and I’m looking forward to building new collaborations here across the department, college and University, as well as the broader Michiana community.”

Predicting self-harm tendencies

Haya Fatimah

Clinical psychologist Haya Fatimah studies complex dynamics in psychopathology, especially those with borderline personality and comorbid disorders.

Fatimah received her doctorate from the University of South Florida and completed a postdoctoral clinical internship at McLean Hospital with Harvard Medical 91��Ƶ. She is particularly interested in predicting factors and behaviors that are aligned with borderline personality disorder such as suicide, non-suicidal injury and substance use. She is currently studying the complex dynamics underlying nonsuicidal self-injury in youth, with the goal of identifying critical windows of risk to inform prevention and treatment efforts.

Fatimah’s goal at Notre Dame in this research is to develop personalized treatment with a dynamic systems approach to understand personality pathology and focus on risk factors and processes at the level of a single individual.

“I am especially interested in how personality pathology emerges, and what we can do about it,” she said.

Lifting the burden of depression

Kaylin Hill

Kaylin Hill finds that emotional experiences are at the heart of what is important to us.

Originally from the South Bend area, Hill received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Purdue University. She studied psychophysiological assessment in particular, using electroencephalogram as an assessment tool in understanding emotions, as well as other neural processes such as reward and error-monitoring.

“I continued to pursue these questions related to understanding emotions broadly and depression more specifically, and as I began to understand more of what these processes look like in adults, I began to ask more questions about how they developed,” she said.

She continued her analysis during a postdoctoral appointment in developmental psychopathology at Vanderbilt University. Hill’s current research focuses on how to better characterize depression symptoms, refine psychophysiological assessment for individuals, and identify both individual and contextual risk processes with a focus toward intervention.

“As a clinical psychologist, the ultimate aim of my work is to reduce the tremendous burden of depression on individuals and families,” she said.

As part of that, Hill is creating the Psychophysiology of Affect Across the Lifespan (PAL) Lab at Notre Dame, where the aim will be to examine emotion and social processes related to depression and the risk of depression in individuals and families.

“I am excited to work alongside my esteemed colleagues, to teach and mentor such wonderful students, and especially to contribute to the growing neuroscience area and to work with the community through the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families,” Hill said. “Additionally, working on campus means that I get to revisit nostalgic experiences from when I was kid, and I am thrilled to offer the same experiences to my children alongside their grandparents.”

The challenge of attention retention

Matthew Robison

As a cognitive psychologist, Matthew Robison aims to answer questions regarding attentiveness — how are some people able to control and sustain their attention while others struggle? Why do people feel alert in some moments but not in others? How do lifestyle factors like sleep, mood and exercise affect cognitive function?

“Attention seems to be one of the core cognitive skills that leads us to success in a variety of mental endeavors,” Robison said. “However, we also know that controlling and sustaining attention is difficult, particularly for some people, and doing so for a long period of time can produce mental strain and fatigue.”

Through his research, Robison addresses three key points — identifying psychological factors that might cause a person to be inattentive and distracted, recognizing when keeping attention causes stress and fatigue, and answering if a person can improve their attention through training exercises.

Robison received his doctorate from the University of Oregon and was a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. A Notre Dame alumnus, he said his return as a faculty member was once a distant dream that has now come true.

“I am excited to collaborate with the wonderful faculty we have in the department and all across campus,” he said. “I’m eager to mentor graduate students to be excellent psychological scientists in this vibrant and rigorous academic environment, to teach and train our undergraduate students in psychological science, and to actively participate in the on-campus and greater South Bend community both through my research and in many other ways.”

Resilience in childhood trauma development

Elizabeth Shewark

As an undergraduate, Elizabeth Shewark found herself becoming increasingly interested in the motivations behind people’s behavior, taking courses in developmental psychology that covered everything from the prenatal period to aging and death.

“I was hooked,” she said. “Change is life. How lucky are we that we get to change over time — that we get to explore all these different versions of ourselves over the course of our lifespan?”

Now, as a developmental psychologist at Notre Dame, Shewark has set a research goal to examine children’s resilience development within their social systems such as families, schools and neighborhoods. She examines this by applying cutting-edge research and statistical methods to illuminate the biological and environmental impacts on child development.

She has further applied this research interest, with support from a National Institutes of Health Pathway to Independence Award, toward children who face trauma and adversity through poverty and exposure to community violence.

Shewark received her doctorate from Penn State University and was inspired to come to Notre Dame after visiting with psychology faculty member Laura Miller-Graff and the psychology department, as well as attending the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society’s Health Equity Data Forum.

“I kept thinking how amazing it would be to work here, with these brilliant individuals and at a university that asks, ‘How can we help?’” she said. “I am incredibly honored to have joined such a thoughtful, innovative and service-oriented community of scholars where I feel like I can have an impact. I look forward to building connections both within the University and in the surrounding communities to advance healthy development for all.”

Insomnia’s impact on health

Ivan Vargas

Sleep can occupy a third of one’s life, yet little is known about it. Ivan Vargas’ research aims to better understand insomnia and its effects on overall health.

“One idea I hope people can take away from the work that I do is that insomnia is not only bad for your sleep, it’s also bad for your health,” he said. “Insomnia affects a lot of people every day, and we often overlook the negative consequences it can have on our overall mental and physical health.”

Vargas received his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program and the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman 91��Ƶ of Medicine. He was most recently an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas.

His work includes a number of projects that evaluate behavioral interventions for sleep such as cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. His research is currently supported by a National Institutes of Health career development award funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Vargas also received his bachelor’s degree from Notre Dame and said he’s excited to see the University’s increased commitment to identifying solutions to address the mental health crisis.

“I look forward to the opportunities that this will provide to our department,” he said. “My hope is that in my time here at Notre Dame, we can expand the knowledge and resources that are available for people struggling with insomnia and related sleep problems.”

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on Sept. 25.

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

Labor economist seeks to understand how society continues to innovate — and why relationships are key to progress

2024-09-16T16:39:00-04:00

Kirk Doran, associate professor of economics, University of Notre Dame.

Kirk Doran has always been fascinated by the development of new knowledge.

Growing up in an academic family, Doran was surrounded by people who had deep discussions on topics such as political science, mathematics and the history of science. He later became inspired by Nobel Prize-winner Paul Romer and his research on what causes long-term per capita economic growth.

“What he discovered is that, whatever causes long-term per capita economic growth, it must be something that is so deeply non-rival that everybody can use it at the same time, without there being any less of it,” Doran said. “And the only thing like that is knowledge.”

From then on, Doran’s research mission has been to identify where and how new knowledge is created.

Doran, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, is one of four finalists from leading global institutions for the 2024 Adam Smith Panmure House Prize.

Established in 2021, the prize is named after the forefather of economics and celebrates those who embody his empiricism and long-term interdisciplinary thinking in their research. It has been given to emerging academic leaders across multiple disciplines, including a business academic, a neurologist and an anthropologist.

“I feel really honored, and I am inspired by the work the previous winners did,” Doran said. “It’s a young prize, and it already highlights really important research in this area.”

Examining productivity and innovation

Like Smith, Doran focuses his research on asking fundamental questions that are often hard to find a definitive answer to because they are so overreaching.

In his subfield of innovation economics, Doran aims to use techniques developed by modern labor economists to answer questions that had been long debated without progress until these techniques were developed. What determines people’s wages? How much more or less will people work if wages increase by 10 percent? What is the long-term economic impact of immigration?

“Those questions were so fraught that labor economists developed the best empirical techniques in those areas in order to finally make progress. When I became an economist, these hadn’t been applied yet to innovation economics,” Doran said. “So it took me a couple of years after I left Princeton (as a graduate and doctoral student) for Notre Dame to really have the courage to dive into this.”

Collaborating with peers such as Harvard University economist George Borjas, Doran has applied empirical tactics to measure knowledge generation through bibliometric analysis of interdisciplinary databases — such as papers, patents and medical trials — that are often hard to collect and define cohesively.

Taken together, his studies find that the development of new knowledge is ultimately based on collaborative relationships in which people inspire and challenge one another.

“The only way that you can get a true expansion in knowledge production — one that doesn’t crowd out other peoples’ knowledge production and create a zero-sum game — is if you’re collaborating really deeply with other new knowledge producers,” Doran said.

The question of how new knowledge evolves is particularly important in today’s world as evidence has shown that innovation and productivity are getting harder to achieve.

“There are more hours necessary for such innovation now than there were 30 years ago, or 60 years ago, or 100 years ago,” Doran said. “The good news is that there are ways of producing new knowledge that are better than we had before, and that is relevant as well.”

Doran plans to continue examining how new knowledge impacts per capita economic growth with a multidisciplinary team. He hopes it will have a policy impact that can benefit productivity.

“The research that I’m doing makes use of concepts that are relevant and used by sociology, that are relevant and used by professors of business; it makes use of the work of historians, and it makes use of raw data from economic history,” he said. “So it’s not just innovation economics, but it also touches upon a number of different fields.”

New knowledge beyond economic growth

These findings, Doran said, can also be applied to creating rewarding personal relationships.

“This is relevant for how to assemble a set of overlapping friendships that can inspire really fruitful things,” he said. “You need to be friends with people who are similar enough to you that you can speak a common language, but different enough from you that you are able to bring different things to the table — you’re able to be complements rather than substitutes. And you need to maintain those friendships long enough that you can produce some wonderful things.”

Beyond having an economic impact, Doran’s research is important because growth can also influence culture and humanity.

“Growth enables more opportunities to relate to the world around you, to relate to other people, to relate to other things, to be creative and, speaking as a Catholic economist, to be subcreators with God,” Doran said. “All of those things are more possible in a world where we’re continuing to grow than in a world where we’re not.”

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on Sept. 16.

In memoriam: Benjamin Radcliff, professor of political science

2024-07-05T11:00:00-04:00

Benjamin Radcliff, a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, died June 10 after a long illness. He was 60.

Radcliff’s scholarly work focused on the intersection of American and comparative politics. He made significant research contributions in three primary areas: social choice theory, the political influence of organized labor and the politics of human happiness.

“He was a prolific scholar, pioneering the study of how political systems influence what he would call the ultimate dependent variable: human happiness,” said Matthew E.K. Hall, the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Professor of Constitutional 91��Ƶ and director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy. “He liked to project a cantankerous, sarcastic persona, but it did little to persuade me that he was anything less than a saint.”

From Ottawa, Illinois, Radcliff received his doctorate in political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He held faculty positions at Rutgers University and Vanderbilt University for two years each, and was part of Notre Dame’s political science department for 30 years. During his tenure, Radcliff served as the director of graduate studies for six years and as the director of the Rooney Center from 2012 through 2013.

His book “The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life” detailed his research on the connection between government support for citizens and workers and overall human happiness. Radcliff also completed two edited volumes and 45 referred journal articles, 14 of which appeared in the three leading journals in political science: the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Politics.

From 2019 through 2022, with department chair and professor Geoffrey Layman, Radcliff served as the co-editor-in-chief of Political Behavior — the official journal of the elections, public opinion and voting behavior organized section of the American Political Science Association. In this position, Layman said, Radcliff was known for his thorough feedback, and he often kindly explained his reasonings to authors whose manuscripts he rejected.

“Ben not only helped the journal reach new heights in terms of scholarly impact and ranking, but also was an exceedingly caring and thoughtful editor,” Layman said.

Beyond academia, Radcliff was also known for his ability to engage in enlightening conversations on subjects ranging from history and politics to music, literature, wine and arcane trivia. With his wife, Amy, Radcliff published the book “Understanding Zen,” which examined zen as a secular doctrine without any necessary relationship to Buddhism or Eastern culture. He also wrote an article on “The Beer Renaissance” in Sky, the Delta Airlines magazine.

“In short, Ben did not just study human happiness, he actively contributed to it,” Layman said.

Radcliff is survived by his wife, as well as his mother, brother and many nieces and nephews. A celebration of life is scheduled to be held in August. Those who wish to honor his memory with a donation can do so at Heifer International using the link set up by his colleagues.

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on July 3.

In memoriam: Winfried ‘Fred’ Dallmayr, professor emeritus of political science

2024-06-13T08:00:00-04:00

Winfried “Fred” Dallmayr, professor emeritus of political science.

Winfried “Fred” Dallmayr, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Notre Dame, died June 5. He was 95.

A native of Germany, Dallmayr experienced a tumultuous childhood during World War II that impacted him greatly and shaped his trajectory as a political theorist and philosopher. His research focused on modern and contemporary European thought, with an interest in comparative or cross-cultural philosophy.

“He fervently believed that political theorists should not limit themselves to Western ideas, but they should be open to global political philosophy and theory,” said A. James McAdams, the William M. Scholl Professor of International Affairs. “He was also a proponent of the idea that morality should not be left up to the individual to determine but rather should grow out of the meaningful interactions of fellow human beings. In this sense, especially given the emphasis that he put on spirituality, Fred was a true Notre Dame intellectual.”

While a part of Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science, Dallmayr was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1978 and a Fulbright Research Grant in India in 1991. He retired in 2004 as the Packey J. Dee Professor of Political Science.

He authored 40 academic books, averaging a production of one book a year, many of which were translated into varying languages. He also co-wrote and edited books until he was 94.

A sampling of his recent publications include “Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and Perspectives” (2012), “Return to Nature?: An Ecological Counterhistory” (2011), “Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars” (2010), “Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction” (2010), “Civilizational Dialogue and Political Thought: Tehran Papers” (2007) and “In Search of the Good Life: A Pedagogy for Troubled Times” (2007).

“He was extraordinary in that sense, and they were high-quality books based on first-rate scholarship, and his works were recognized as such by people around the world,” said McAdams, who noted he saw Dallmayr give a book presentation only four weeks before his death. “Until the very end, he was the consummate intellectual.”

Dallmayr began his academic career in Germany and Italy. After immigrating to the United States in 1955, he received a doctorate in political science from Duke University in 1960 and taught at Purdue University until he joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1978, holding a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy.

He also served as the president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, an advisory member of the scientific committee of Reset Dialogues on Civilizations (Reset DOC) in Rome, the executive co-chair of World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations (WPF-DOC) in Vienna, and was a member of the supervisory board of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute in Berlin.

Dallmayr is survived by his wife, Ilse Dallmayr; two children, Dominique and Philip; and two grandchildren, Keegan and Josefina.

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on June 12.