Mark Noll to deliver ACHA keynote address in place of Michael Hochgeschwender
The keynote speaker for the American Catholic Historical Association's spring meeting, Michael Hochgeschwender, has canceled his public lecture this Thursday due to illness. Conference participants will instead hear from Mark Noll, the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Noll's talk, titled "Catholic Opinion Concerning Protestant Responsibility for the Civil War," continues on the Civil War sesquicentennial theme that Hochgeschwender intended to address. It will take place at the same time and place, 5 p.m. Thursday, March 26, in the McKenna Hall auditorium, and it is free and open to the public.…
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Gretchen Buggeln on "Art, Architecture, and Liturgical Space in Postwar America"
On February 23, Gretchen Buggeln presented a lecture titled "Art, Architecture, and Liturgical Space in Postwar America." Buggeln holds the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christianity and the Arts at Valparaiso University, where she is on the faculty of Christ College. Cosponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, the Institute for Church Life, and the School of Architecture, Buggeln's lecture was based on her forthcoming book, The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America, which will be published by University of Minnesota Press in December.
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Cushwa Center to host meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association
The University of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism will host the spring meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA) from Thursday, March 26, through Saturday, March 28, at the Notre Dame Conference Center in McKenna Hall.…
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Meet Research Travel Grant recipient Jessie Whitish
Jessie Whitish received her master's degree in women's and gender studies from the University of Louisville this year. The research she did in the archives relates to her thesis, "Radical Sister: Lucy Freibert as Feminist Nun, Activist, and Educator." She is considering a PhD in history, and she will be presenting at the Cushwa Center's "Nun in the World" symposium in May.
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Five Questions for Research Travel Grant recipient Suzanne Krebsbach
Suzanne Krebsbach is an independent historian in Charleston, South Carolina. She's working on a book, tentatively titled "Black Catholics in Charleston: Identity & Community," which is under contract with the University of South Carolina Press. She received a 2014 travel research grant from the Cushwa Center and came to work in the Notre Dame Archives over the summer.
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Meet Research Travel Grant recipient Herbie Miller
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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Seminar in American Religion: Paula M. Kane's Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America
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 joins the Cushwa Center as postdoc fellow
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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Novelist Ron Hansen Delivers Lecture on Being a Catholic Writer
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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Five questions for research travel grant recipient Jeff Appelhans
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.…
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Acclaimed Irish Musician Presents Hibernian Lecture and Recital Featuring Chief O'Neill's Music of Ireland
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.…
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John T. McGreevy Presents Annual Cushwa Center Lecture on 19th-Century Jesuits
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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Five questions for research travel grant recipient Kristen Shedd
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 to present recital/lecture for annual Hibernian Lecture
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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Five questions for research travel grant recipient Margaret Abruzzo
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…
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Five questions for research travel grant recipient Jeanne Petit
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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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. .
Call for Papers: The Nun in the World: A Transnational Study of Catholic Sisters and the Second Vatican Council
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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Meet Research Travel Grant recipient Geneviève Piché
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.
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Upcoming Cushwa Center conference to examine lived history of Vatican II around the globe
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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Cushwa Center director receives Global Collaboration Initiative Grant for Catholic sisters and Vatican II project
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.…
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Five questions for Research Travel Grant recipient Candice Shy Hooper
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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Five questions for Hibernian Research Award recipient Michelle Granshaw
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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Cushwa Center director contributes to special issue of America magazine
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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Interview with Una Cadegan, author of most recent volume in the Cushwa Center's book series
Una Cadegan, associate professor of history at the University of Dayton, is the author of All Good Books Are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America (Cornell University Press).
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Five questions for research travel grant recipient Henry Maar
Henry Maar, a PhD candidate in history at the University of California Santa Barbara, is one of the Cushwa Center's research travel grant recipients for 2013. We caught up with him earlier this summer during his week at the Notre Dame Archives.
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Research travel grant recipient William S. Cossen on "the Protestant other"
William S. Cossen is a PhD candidate in history at Penn State and a recipient of the 2013 Cushwa Center research travel grant. He spoke with us about his research in August, while he was visiting the University of Notre Dame Archives.
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CFP: Lived History of Vatican II Conference, April 24-27, 2014
The Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism in conjunction with Northwestern University invites paper proposals for an international conference on the Lived History of Vatican II to be convened at the University of Notre Dame April 24-27, 2014. We seek scholars and advanced graduate students who will present close-grained local histories of the immediate Council era and its aftermath in a particular diocese or geographic region. Preference will be given to proposals that focus on how the attempt to implement Vatican II interacted with a specific local context to shape the development of a key element of Catholic life such as worship, ecumenical relations, religious or family life, or social activism in a given locale. …
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Five questions for Cushwa Fellow Charlotte Hansen
Charlotte Hansen, PhD, is a Cushwa Fellow for six weeks this spring. Hansen, an administrator and researcher at the George Bell Institute at the University of Chichester in Sussex (UK), is also an affiliated lecturer with the university's Department of History…
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