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In the presence of Giants

Carrie Gates

Decades before Jackie Robinson became the first Black man to play in the major leagues, the Foundry Giants—a team of Black players working in the Studebaker factory’s foundry—were making a name for themselves as one of the strongest independent baseball teams in the Midwest. The South Bend team played in Studebaker’s otherwise all-white industrial league in the 1920s and 1930s...

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Sister Rosemary Connelly to receive 2023 Laetare Medal

Carrie Gates

Sister Rosemary Connelly, R.S.M., former executive director of Misericordia and lifelong advocate for individuals with developmental disabilities, will receive the University of Notre Dame’s 2023 Laetare Medal — the oldest and most prestigious honor given to American Catholics — at Notre Dame’s 178th University Commencement Ceremony on May 21 (Sunday).

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Notre Dame psychologist Jessica Payne receives National Academy of Sciences recognition, National Science Foundation funding for her research on sleep, stress, and memory

Carrie Gates

Psychologist Jessica Payne is passionate about helping the world better understand the value of sleep — and the many ways it impacts our cognition, health, and longevity. She dreams of a society where people no longer take pride in how little sleep they need to get by, but how much they sleep in order to thrive. Her groundbreaking research on sleep, stress, and...

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Francie Shaft thought her theology and Japanese majors would never intersect — until she went abroad. Now the connections keep appearing. 

Carrie Gates

Francie Shaft has discovered intersections between her theology and Japanese majors through her classes and research — both on campus and in Japan. Those opportunities would not have been possible, she said, without the support she found at Notre Dame. “Notre Dame wants you to start pursuing what you’re passionate about, even as a freshman. If I didn’t have these people...

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Through video and book projects, French professor explores why global women writers are gravitating toward Paris

Carrie Gates

Alison Rice, an associate professor of French and Francophone studies, conducted 18 filmed interviews in Paris over eight years with authors originally from Iran, Korea, Senegal, and Bulgaria, among other countries. She compiled, edited, and translated the interviews to create an online archive, accessible to scholars and students worldwide, and is now completing a book project based on the interviews.

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Quesada and Robles strengthen Department of English’s expertise in global and multicultural literature

Carrie Gates

Sarah Quesada's research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century Latinx and Latin American literatures, Francophone West African literature, decolonial and spatial theory, and heritage tourism of the African diaspora. Francisco Robles focuses on multiethnic American literature of the 20th century, particularly African American, Chicanx, Southwestern, postcolonial, and LGBTQ literature. Both have close ties to Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies. 

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Shakespeare at Notre Dame to present ‘Hamlet 50/50,’ a new gender-balanced adaptation of the play

Carrie Gates

This week, the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival Professional Company will debut “Hamlet 50/50,” a world-premiere adaptation of the play focused on creating a more gender-balanced and equitable production model. “Hamlet 50/50” will be performed in the Patricia George Decio Theatre in the University’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center from Aug. 17 to 27.

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How the liberal arts instilled curiosity, boldness, and fearlessness in a history and Japanese student — and carried her from USA Today to Hollywood red carpets

Carrie Gates

For Arienne Thompson Plourde ’04, the first step toward a successful journalism career was to study history and Japanese. Although it might seem an unlikely combination for an aspiring journalist, it gave her a strong foundation to build on — and just as importantly, four years to study what she loved. “For me, I always knew that I wanted to be...

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American studies professor wins Frederick Douglass Book Prize — the seventh book award for her research on slaves’ courtroom testimony

Carrie Gates

Sophie White, a professor in the Department of American Studies, has won the prestigious 2020 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for her work, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana. The prize, sponsored by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, recognizes the best...

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Race and ragtime, gender and genre: Exploring the unexamined history of the American piano

Carrie Gates

For Rebecca McKenna, the piano’s history is about much more than just manufacturing or marketing — it’s about issues of race, class, and gender at the turn of the 20th century. McKenna, an assistant professor in the Department of History, is exploring all of these issues with support from a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.

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Scholars of Spanish and Italian culture and literature join Arts and Letters faculty

Carrie Gates

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures has added expertise in modern Spanish and Italian culture and literature this year with two new faculty hires — Pedro Aguilera-Mellado and Charles Leavitt IV. Aguilera-Mellado, who comes to Notre Dame from the University of Michigan, focuses on modern and contemporary Spain. Leavitt, who received a Ph.D. from Notre Dame in 2010, returns to...

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Spanish professor wins book prize for her work on Latin American female travel writers

Carrie Gates

Vanesa Miseres, an assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, has won a prize from the International Institute of Latin American Literature for her book Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica. Mujeres en tránsito examines four prominent female writers who traveled to and from Latin America in the 19th century — Flora Tristan, Juana...

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Irish studies and English professor Barry McCrea awarded Princeton Humanities Council fellowship

Carrie Gates

One of the things that drives novelists, McCrea said, is the desire to narrate their own generation. He sees his generation — in Europe and in the U.S. — as “a kind of forgotten middle child,” squeezed between the baby boomers and the millennials. “I wanted to tell the story of my generation, connected to the traditional, often rural life of our parents...

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Romance Languages and Literatures chair strives to bring literary and cultural context to American understanding of Cuba

Carrie Gates

Thomas Anderson, a professor of Spanish and chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, has written two books on Cuban literature and culture and has published an edited volume of a leading Cuban author’s letters. Currently, he is working on a book that focuses on images of the U.S. civil rights movement in Cuban poetry.

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Global works of art from Notre Dame Crucifix Initiative to be displayed at The History Museum

Carrie Gates

Selected works of art from the Crucifix Initiative will be on display in an exhibit on view starting Thursday (Aug. 10) at The History Museum in South Bend, Indiana. Launched in 2019, the initiative seeks to highlight the globalism of Catholicism — and to represent the diversity and internationalism of the University and its community — by building and displaying...

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Senior art history major Meg Burns awarded Luce Scholarship

Carrie Gates

Notre Dame senior Margaret “Meg” Burns, an art history major from San Antonio, Texas, has been awarded a 2021–22 Luce Scholarship. The scholarship provides a stipend, language training, and individualized professional placement in Asia, with a goal of enhancing the understanding of Asia among potential leaders of American society. Burns is Notre Dame’s 10th Luce Scholar in total and its third...

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Social design professor receives grant to mitigate youth violence in South Bend through access to arts programming and community engagement

Carrie Gates

Neeta Verma’s teaching and research examines a range of social inequities facing the local community — including homelessness, poverty, and the digital divide. But the issue she finds most pressing is youth violence — and she believes that art and design can play a key role in breaking its vicious cycle. With a grant from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, she is launching a...

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Through research and teaching, Notre Dame historian and gender studies scholar-in-residence explores how archives shape narratives

Carrie Gates

What Karen Graubart didn’t find in archives in Spain and Peru was, in some ways, as valuable as what she did. An associate professor in the Department of History, Graubart has spent more than 15 years conducting archival research on women and non-dominant communities in the Iberian Empire for her first two books. But she is also considering how the archives themselves...

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‘Ways of seeing and changing the world’: Gender Studies Program marks 30 years

Carrie Gates

Three decades after its founding, the Gender Studies Program is thriving, with more than 70 students currently pursuing gender studies majors, supplementary majors, and minors at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as more than 50 associated faculty across campus. Hundreds of students have found a home in the program over the years — including Sarah A. Mustillo ’96, the...

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Social design course challenges students from Notre Dame and India to use creativity to tackle a global problem

Carrie Gates

When Kacey Hengesbach began her undergraduate career at Notre Dame, she didn’t imagine that it would include traveling 8,000 miles to Ahmedabad, India. But thanks to a new course created by Neeta Verma, she had the chance to spend three weeks there last summer, working collaboratively with students from India’s National Institute of Design. 

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