Cushwa Center Fellows

Austin Clements

Postdoctoral Research Associate
aclemen8@nd.edu

Austin Clements is a historian of the 19th- and 20th-century United States specializing in the intersection of religion, politics, and culture. His current research focuses on the emergence of the modern conservative worldview from World War I to the Cold War, examining a wide variety of American religious traditions that came to view godlessness as a common enemy and each other as unlikely allies.

Clements earned his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University, where he also received his M.A. He received his B.A. in history with honors and a minor in religious studies from Arizona State University. As a graduate student at Stanford, he was the inaugural graduate student fellow in the American Religions in a Global Context Initiative, a dissertation prize fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, a Gerald J. Lieberman Fellow, and a graduate student fellow at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics and Society.

Alice Laburthe

Research Fellow
alaburth@nd.edu

Alice Laburthe is a historian of U.S. and French imperialism specializing in the intersection of gender and settler colonialism. Her dissertation traces and compares the education of Indigenous women by French nuns in 19th-century Algeria and the American Midwest. Through a comparative lens and the prism of missionary educational work, Laburthe has shed new light on the ambivalence and precariousness of settler colonial ambitions and projects, as well as the persistence, diversity, and adaptability of Indigenous resistance in settler colonies.

Laburthe pursued doctoral studies in modern European and U.S. history at Northwestern University, where she received a T.H. Breen Fellowship and the Henry Binford Teaching Prize. She earned a B.A. and an M.A. in history from the University of Toulouse II as well as a B.A. in social sciences from the University of Paris V.

Jacob Saliba

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Cushwa Center and Global Catholic Research Initiative
jsaliba2@nd.edu

Trained as an intellectual historian of modern Europe, Jacob Saliba’s research explores the influence of Catholic thought on 20th century politics, culture, and philosophy, including questions of interreligious dialogue, secularism, alterity, and globalization. His current research focuses on the community bonds formed between Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and secular intellectuals in France, Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the United States between World War I and World War II.

Saliba earned his Ph.D. in history and his M.A. in political science from Boston College and his B.A. in political science and economics from Ohio Dominican University. He is the recipient of the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award for 2026 as well as previous fellowships with the Social Science Research Council, Loyola University Chicago, and the Clough Center for the Study of Democracy at Boston College. Saliba is the author of two book translations (French to English), Authority, History, and Political Theology (Bloomsbury, 2026) and Thinking God Otherwise (Wipf & Stock, 2025) as well as peer-reviewed articles in The Catholic Historical Review, The Journal of Global Catholicism, and The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy.

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Senior Fellow

Luca Codignola

Senior Fellow in Rome
Notre Dame Rome (Rome, Italy)
lcodigno@nd.edu

Luca Codignola joined the Cushwa Center as senior fellow in 2016. He chairs the center’s Rome Advisory Committee.

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).

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Past Fellows

Melissa Coles

Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2024–26

Angela Xia

Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2024–26

Philip Byers

Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2020–23

Rev. Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C.

Postdoctoral Fellow, 2020–22

Rose Luminiello

Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2019–22

Jacqueline Willy Romero

Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2021–22

Peter Cajka

Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2017–19

Maggie Elmore

Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2018–19

Valentina Ciciliot

Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, 2016–18

Benjamin J. Wetzel

Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2017–18

Matteo Binasco

Postdoctoral Fellow in Rome, 2014–17

Catherine Osborne

Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2014–17

Jana Skjoldi

Visiting Fellow, Spring 2015