Fellows
Philip Byers
Postdoctoral Research Associate
405 Geddes Hall
pbyers2@nd.edu
Philip Byers joined the Cushwa Center as a postdoctoral research associate in 2020. His scholarship and teaching interests include 20th century U.S. religion and political culture, with special focus on philanthropy and humanitarianism. He earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Notre Dame in May 2020. His dissertation, “How Firm the Foundation: The Lilly Endowment and American Christianity, 1937–1989,” analyzes the most concentrated and sustained external source of financial provision for postwar Christian communities. Joining perennial debates regarding the role of private money in society, the dissertation demonstrates the centrality of funding to postwar American religion and reveals core assumptions that underlie much contemporary philanthropic practice.
Byers has received research support from numerous sources, including the Hagley Museum and Library, the Economic History Society (U.K.), the Business History Conference, and Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and he has served as a graduate student affiliate of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. His work has appeared in the journal Religions and the forthcoming Indiana University Press volume Hoosier Philanthropy. He previously taught “Religion and Politics in Modern America” for the Notre Dame history department and served for two years as co-convener for the Colloquium on Religion and History (CORAH).
Luca Codignola
Senior Fellow
Rome Global Gateway (Rome, Italy)
lcodigno@nd.edu
Luca Codignola joined the Cushwa Center in 2016. A historian of the early modern era, Codignola is former professor of Early North American History at Università di Genova (Italy), where he served on the faculty for 25 years. His career also includes four years as head of the Institute of History of Mediterranean Europe of Italy's National Research Council and recent affiliations with University of Toronto, Université Laval, and Saint Mary's University (Halifax).
The author of 10 books and editor of more than a dozen volumes, Codignola’s recent publications include Little Do We Know: History and Historians of the North Atlantic, 1492–2010 (2011); and Blurred Nationalities across the North Atlantic: Traders, Priests, and Their Kin Travelling between North America and the Italian Peninsula, 1763–1846 (2019).