Announcements

William Cossen (2013 grant recipient), a graduate student in history at Penn State, is currently writing his dissertation and serving as editorial assistant for the Journal of the Civil War Era, and a research associate for the Association of Religion Data Archives. His article “Monk in the Middle: The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery and the Making of Catholic Identity” appeared in the Spring 2014 issue of American Catholic Studies, and his article “Catholics, Constitutions, and Conventions: Bishop John England and the Democratization of American Catholicism” appeared in the October 2013 issue of the South Carolina Historical Magazine.

He contributed the entries “Anti-Catholic Nativism and Antebellum America” and “American Catholicism and Vatican II,” to the online textbook, The American Yawp.

Cossen presented “Philippine Colonization and the American Catholic Press: A Study in Religious Imperialism” at the American Catholic Historical Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.  January 2, 2014.  Finally, Cossen appeared as a contestant on Jeopardy! in September.

Matthew J. Cressler (2012) defended his dissertation, “Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: African American Catholics in Chicago from Great Migrations to Black Power,” and graduated from Northwestern University in the spring of 2014. He joined the faculty of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where he has a joint appointment as assistant professor of African and African American studies and religion. His article “Black Power, Vatican II, and the Emergence of Black Catholic Liturgies” is forthcoming in U.S. Catholic Historian.

Janine Giordano Drake (2010) received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014 after defending her dissertation, “Between Religion and Politics: The Working Class Religious Left, 1880-1920.” She was appointed assistant professor of history at the University of Great Falls, in Great Falls, Montana, where she began teaching this fall.

In 2012 Angelyn Dries, O.S.F. (2009) was named professor emerita of theological studies at Saint Louis University, where she held the Danforth Chair in the Humanities since 2003. After retiring she continued to work with four doctoral students until they passed the oral defense of their dissertation.  
She continues to write on mission history and world Christianity. As part of a book on the history of the Columban missionaries, “Of Christ and Not of Ourselves”: The Missionary Society of Saint Columban: The North American Story, 1918-2018, she is completing a chapter that examines the Columban work among Chinese (1940-80), Filipinos (1942-present), and Koreans (1972-present) in the Los Angeles area.

Rebecca Berru Davis (2009 and 2014) is a Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow for 2014-15. As part of the program, she is teaching theology at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and is associated with the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research. Her research project with the Institute draws on the archival work she carried out this summer, thanks to the Cushwa Travel Grant she received.

Candice Shy Hooper (2013) spent most of last year revising her manuscript of Lincoln’s Generals’ Wives, which is now under active review by a publisher.  In July 2013 and January 2014, she reviewed books about the Civil War for the Journal of Military History. In January 2014, she spoke to the 22nd Annual Sarasota Civil War Symposium on the topic of Lincoln’s generals’ wives.  “In the course of my presentation, I made a point of emphasizing the quality of the Notre Dame Archives and archivists,” wrote Hooper, “and my appreciation for the Cushwa Center Travel Grant.” In February 2015, she will be speaking at the 55th Annual Florida Conference of Historians on the topic “The War that Made Hollywood: How the Spanish-American War Saved the U.S. Film Industry.”

Jonathan Koefoed (2012) defended his dissertation, “Cautious Romantics: Trinitarian Transcendentalists and the Emergence of a Conservative Religious Tradition in America” in the fall of 2013 and received his Ph.D. in history from Boston University in 2014. He has been appointed a postdoctoral fellow at the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin beginning in January 2015.

In February 2014 Gráinne McEvoy (2011) defended her dissertation, “Justice and Order: American Catholic Social Thought and the Immigration Question in the Restriction Era, 1917-1965,” and she received her Ph.D. in history from Boston College in May. McEvoy is now a postdoctoral fellow in the history department at Boston College.

Monica Mercado (2010) defended her dissertation, “Women and the Word: Gender, Print, and Catholic Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,” and graduated with her Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in August 2014. Her first article from this research appeared in the summer 2013 issue of U.S. Catholic Historian. In July Mercado joined Bryn Mawr College as a Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow, directing The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education and soaking in all the Catholic history resources around Philadelphia.

Herbie Miller (2013), Ph.D. candidate at the University of Dayton, presented a paper at the Fall 2014 Conference on Faith and History at Pepperdine University. “Protestant Hermeneutics as Disguised Deism: Making the Case against Sola Scriptura in the 1837 Campbell-Purcell Debate” is based on his dissertation research.

Catherine O’Donnell (2009) is associate professor of history at Arizona State University. She is writing a biography of Elizabeth Seton. She has published several smaller pieces drawn from the research she conducted with her Cushwa Research Travel Grant, including most recently “John Carroll, Joseph Dennie, and the Quest for a Limited Authority,” in Public Intellectuals in the Early American Republic (Heidelberg Press, 2013). O’Donnell is the author of two forthcoming chapters: “British-Atlantic Catholicism: Evolution and Adaptation,” in The British Atlantic, ed. Michael Meranze and Saree Makdisi (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and “John Carroll, the Catholic Church, and the Society of Jesus in Early Republic America,” in Jesuit Survivals and Restoration, ed. Robert Maryks and Jonathan Wright (Brill, 2015).

Charity Vogel (2003) is a reporter for the Buffalo News. Her book, The Angola Horror: The 1867 Train Wreck That Shocked the Nation and Transformed American Railroads, was published by Cornell Univeristy Press in 2013.