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Herbie Miller is ABD in theology at the University of Dayton. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Religious Controversy and the Making of Americans: A Study of the 1837 Campbell-Purcell Debate,” is an historical and theological analysis of a weeklong oral debate that happened in 1837 in Cincinnati between the leader of the Disciples of Christ, Alexander Campbell, and the Catholic bishop of Cincinnati, John Purcell.…

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Konieczny, Kane, and Hansen On September 27, the Seminar in American Religion discussed Paula M. Kane’s Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Kane, a longtime friend and collaborator of the Cushwa Center, holds the John and Lucine O’Brien Marous Chair in Contemporary Catholic Studies at the University of Pittsburgh with a joint appointment in the Department of History. Her research interests within American religious history include modern Catholicism, gender, art, film, and architecture. Her many publications include numerous book chapters and articles, along with Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism, 1900-1920…

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Catherine Osborne is the Cushwa Center's postdoctoral fellow for 2014-2015. Osborne, who earned her PhD in theology at Fordam University and taught last year at Franklin and Marshall College, is the first person to hold this new position. She's been hard at work since she arrived in August, and she recently filled us in on what she's been doing.…

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Ron Hansen On September 26, Ron Hansen presented a public lecture titled “On Being a Catholic Writer: Seeing into the Middle of Things.” Hansen is the author of nine novels, including Mariette in Ecstasy, Exiles, Atticus, and, most recently, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion…

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Jeff Appelhans is a PhD candidate at the University of Delaware, where he is working on his dissertation, “Catholic Persuasion: Power and Prestige in Early American Civil Life.” He made a research trip to Notre Dame last summer after receiving a reserch travel grant in 2014 from the Cushwa Center.…

Read More about Five questions for research travel grant recipient Jeff Appelhans

Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin  The fall 2014 Hibernian Lecture, held on October 3 in Hesburgh Library’s Carey Auditorium, featured a presentation by acclaimed Irish musician Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin. He spoke about and performed traditional Irish music collected by Francis O’Neill, an Irishman who emigrated to the United States, joined the Chicago Police Department, and served as its superintendent from 1901-1905, all the while pursing his avocation of music collection and preservation.…

Read More about Acclaimed Irish Musician Presents Hibernian Lecture and Recital Featuring Chief O’Neill’s Music of Ireland

John T. McGreevy The 2014 Cushwa Center Lecture on September 17 featured a presentation by John T. McGreevy, the I. A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. This lecture, titled “The Jesuits, Father Sorin, and the 19th-Century Catholic Revival” was part of a yearlong celebration of the bicentennial of the birth of Father Edward Sorin, C.S.C., founder of the University of Notre Dame. …

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Kristen Shedd is visiting assistant professor of history at Oklahoma State University. Her research on the decline of moral and political authority in Cold War America has taken her to the Library of Congress, the American Humanist Association, Princeton University, University of Michigan, the Andover Theological Library, the California Historical Society, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the Eisenhower and Kennedy Presidential Libraries. She made a research trip to the Notre Dame Archives this summer through the support of a Cushwa Center Travel Grant in 2014.…

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Acclaimed Irish musician Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin will present this year’s Hibernian Lecture,  “Chief O'Neill's Music of Ireland,” on Friday, Oct. 3 at 4:00 p.m. at the Carey Auditorium in Hesburgh Library. Ó Súilleabháin Ó Súilleabháin is chair of music and founding director emeritus of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick. Noted for his development of a uniquely Irish traditional piano style, he has recorded extensively with the Irish Chamber Orchestra and has released more than 10 CD recordings.…

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Margaret Abruzzo is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama. Her first book, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Johns Hopkins, 2011), used the slavery debate to trace the changing moral meanings of humaneness and cruelty. She's on sabbatical this year, splitting her time between the Cushwa Center in the fall and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, where she will be a residential fellow…

Read More about Five questions for research travel grant recipient Margaret Abruzzo

Jeanne Petit is professor of history at Hope College and a 2013 Cushwa Travel Grant recipient. Her first book, The Men and Women We Want: Gender, Race, and the Progressive Era Literacy Test Debate (University of Rochester Press, 2010), explores the ways that debates about immigration restriction in the early 20th century tapped into broader concerns about American national identity.…

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Rev. Stephen Badin The University of Notre Dame has acquired a Bible once owned by Rev. Stephen Badin, the pioneer priest on whose mission grounds Notre Dame’s founder, Rev. Edward Sorin, C.S.C., began to build the University 172 years ago. Father Badin’s Bible was purchased from the Sisters of Loretto of Nerinx, Kentucky, and a delegation of sisters is coming to Notre Dame on Monday (July 14) to deliver it by hand during a Mass that will be celebrated in the Log Chapel where Father Badin is buried.…

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The Cushwa Center is pleased to announce the recipients of the Center's annual Research Travel Grants, the Hibernian Award, and the Peter R. D'Agostino Research Travel Grant.   .

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University of Notre Dame, London Centre 7-9 May 2015 Call for Papers: The Nun in the World (pdf) This symposium aims to unite three burgeoning areas of scholarship in religious history: the examination of the “lived history” of the Second Vatican Council; an analysis of the Roman Catholic Church as a transnational actor in global history; and efforts to develop a comprehensive understanding of Catholic women’s religious institutes through the lens of the history of gender and voluntarism during one of the most transformative moments in their collective history. At the Council, religious communities were urged to seek renewal by examining the original charisms of their founders and by subjecting their life and ministry to prayerful scrutiny. This search for renewal prompted most communities to implement a variety of structural changes and to reconceptualize their mission within a church now open and receptive to “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties” of the age.…

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Geneviève Piché is a graduate student at the Université de Sherbrooke in Québec, Canada. She’s currently in the process of writing her dissertation, When Two Worlds Meet: Louisianans’ Slaves and the Catholic Church, 1803-1842. Piché received a Cushwa Center Research Travel Grant in 2013, and recently spoke with us about her research.

Read More about Meet Research Travel Grant recipient Geneviève Piché

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism has organized an international multiyear examination of the council’s impact around the world. The center recruited 15 scholars to do research on individual dioceses—five in the United States and 10 in other countries—and write essays on their findings. Notre Dame will host a conference of those scholars and others in the spring, and a book will be published the following year, 50 years after the closing of the council.…

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Notre Dame International (NDI) has awarded a $20,000 grant to Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of the Cushwa Center and associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, for her project, “From Daughters of the Church to Citizens of the World: A Transnational Study of Catholic Sisters and the Second Vatican Council.” A team of 15 scholars will participate in the project, which will culminate in a symposium at Notre Dame’s Global Gateway in London in late spring 2015.…

Read More about Cushwa Center director receives Global Collaboration Initiative Grant for Catholic sisters and Vatican II project

Candice Shy Hooper Candice Shy Hooper is an independent scholar working on a book project titled Lincoln & His Generals’ Wives: How Four Women Influenced the Course of the Civil War—for Better and for Worse. She is a 2013 Research Travel Grant…

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Michelle Granshaw is in her first year on the theatre arts faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. She is one of two recipients of the Hibernian Research Award this year, and she recently explained to us what the hibernicon is and gave us an update on her book project.…

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The October 28 special issue of America, the Jesuit weekly magazine, highlights women in the life of the church. The principal contributors to this issue, all women, examine topics such as ministry, spirituality, social justice, and work-life balance. Cushwa Center director Kathleen Sprows Cummings contributed the essay “A Promising Path,”…

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