2022-23 Year in Review

Will Beattie Page 41

Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik Page 31

Peter Gatrell Page 25

Werner Sollors Page 24

Lindsay Burgess Page 5

Giorgi Margvelashvili Page 23

Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti Page 22

Korey Garibaldi Page 17

Pamela Cheek Page 18

Zahia Rahmani Page 24

Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović Page 23

Cover Illustrations: David Despau, Colagene, Creative Clinic

A YEAR IN PORTRAITS Building bridges with artisans for a new humanity

It was a difficult morning on Thursday, July 6, 2023, in Šibenik, Croatia. The Nanovic Institute and the Catholic University of Croatia had partnered on organizing a summer school for students from Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv and other students from the Catholic Universities Partnership. When we awoke in Croatia, we received the news that a Russian missile had hit a building within 220 yards of UCU. The attack was the most destructive attack on the civilian population in the Lviv region since the beginning of the full-scale war in February 2022.

The Ukrainian students were in shock since they knew the destroyed buildings very well from their daily visits to campus, and there was even some damage to the campus itself. There were prayers, tears, phone calls and text messages, exchanges and dialogues, and, from the non-Ukrainian students and faculty members, expressions of solidarity and comfort, followed by additional sessions of the summer school on resilience and recovery.

That morning in Croatia was a teaching moment for the Nanovic Institute: We want to build bridges; bridges between Notre Dame and Europe and between Europe and Notre Dame, but also bridges between students from different countries, bridges between faculty and students, bridges between faith and research, bridges between suffering and hope, bridges between resilience and recovery.

This commitment to bridge building is not new: In fact, the very idea of the Nanovic Institute, since it was founded more than 30 years ago, is an expression of the will to build bridges. We may think of student research in Europe, European visiting scholars at Notre Dame, joint research projects, and international conferences. But bridges can also be existential. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the mental and political map of Europe will never be the same again. It has changed dramatically. One of the core missions of the Nanovic Institute is the bridge building between war-torn Ukraine and countries in peace. The response to the “integral human destruction” imposed on Ukraine is “integral human development,” the defining slogan of the Keough School of Global Affairs.

Working with our students in their intellectual, spiritual, social, and professional journeys we want to prepare “artisans for a new humanity.” Each student is an ambassador of this lofty goal. My esteemed faculty fellows and colleagues at the Nanovic Institute, together with those scholars and leaders who joined our conversation over this past year, are ambassadors in their own right and travel companions.

I want to express my sincere respect and gratitude to the members of the Nanovic Institute community for all their efforts to expand our vision of what it means to honor the dignity of each human person. I trust that this “Year in Review,” so skillfully and creatively put together by my colleagues, will offer a portrait of these efforts and commitments.

Clemens Sedmak Director, Nanovic Institute for European Studies Professor of Social Ethics

The four sections of this publication were inspired by the goals of the institute's 2021-2026 Strategic Plan.

How does Nanovic “Foster”?

The Nanovic Institute has long maintained a focus on the education and formation of undergraduate students. By animating its undergraduate student learning experience with a vision of “bridgebuilding” with Europe and its people, the institute fosters academic growth, intellectual creativity, and personal development.

– Lindsay Burgess ’24 Undergraduate Student with Majors in German and Science-Business and a European Studies Minor

“The Nanovic Institute’s programs not only foster the education of students but also their formation as empathetic and understanding people.”

Serving in Europe

Following the success of our pilot service learning program, Serving (in) Europe continues in its second iteration this summer. Last year, students served in Armenia, Bulgaria, and Italy, working with refugees, adults with disabilities, and homeless centers. The students were deeply impacted by the work and those they served. This summer, 12 students spent eight weeks serving and learning alongside communities on the peripheries in Sofia (Bulgaria), Milan (Italy), Lublin (Poland), and Važec (Slovakia). This program brings students directly into conversation with the most pressing social and moral challenges in Europe today. Students are accompanied by experienced volunteer coordinators and local community members to gain a nuanced understanding of the challenges the communities face.

Our new placements in Poland and Slovakia were graciously facilitated by our Catholic Universities Partnership partners.

Midwest Model European Union

In March 2023, a student delegation from Notre Dame organized by the Nanovic Institute entered the Midwest Model EU competition in Bloomington, Indiana. This year the Notre Dame team won second and third places while modeling Sweden

and France. Five individual students were also recognized for outstanding work on specific committees.

Demetrios Fotopoulos and Anne Rehill shared their experiences in a Nanovic news article. Read more at go.nd.edu/29a43d

EuroCup

The competition was fierce at this year’s Eurocup. Representing their residence halls, students gathered to compete in European trivia to take home the cup for the upcoming year. Answering questions like “Where do the UK and Spain share a border?” and “On what island did the 1926 Nobel prize winner for literature Grazia Deledda grow up?”

(for those who wish to play along, answers to both questions can be found on page 4). For the third year running, St. Edward’s Hall took the title. A second team for St. Ed’s also submitted the best team name, as voted on by Nanovic staff, “Walking in an Ursula von de land.” Great fun and international learning was had by all.

RIGHT: Bryan Fok ’25 colors with young asylum seekers at the reception center Casa Suraya (Milan, Italy) during his Serving (in) Europe placement.

Diplomacy Scholars

From Washington, DC, to The Hague and Brussels, Nanovic Diplomacy Scholars immersed themselves in the institutions and practices of international diplomacy throughout this past academic year. During the fall diplomacy immersion in DC, students met with the first Secretary of the Embassy of Ukraine, Dr. Kateryna Smagliy. In the spring, Dr. Susanne Keppler-Schlesinger, director of the Austrian Cultural Forum and former deputy director of the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, came to campus

to meet with Diplomacy Scholars one-on-one, providing career advice and practical skillbuilding exercises. Then in May, the students traveled to Belgium and the Netherlands to visit important institutions and organizations working in European diplomacy, including the European Commission and NATO headquarters. The Nanovic Institute is excited about the continued opportunities for students to grow as scholars and global citizens through the Diplomacy Scholars program.

European studies students on the steps of the South Dining Hall at Notre Dame.

Graduation Breakfast & Wegs Prize

It is both a joy and a little sad to say farewell to graduating seniors in European studies. To commemorate this important milestone, the institute held its annual graduation breakfast with students and their families, where it presented each graduate with a certificate and a small gift. Three graduating student workers who served the institute faithfully for several years were also recognized.

The graduation breakfast included the announcement of the winner of the J. Robert Wegs prize, which is named for the Institute's founding director and given to the student with the best capstone essay for the European studies minor. This year Eoghan Fay was the winner with his essay "This Greek Sink of Iniquity: British Fiscal Policy in Greece, Shifting Great Power Politics, and the Truman Doctrine 1944-1947." He and his family shared breakfast with Dr. Joyce Wegs, representing the late Dr. Wegs, and the Nanovic Institute’s director, Clemens Sedmak . Fay also took the opportunity to present Anna Dolezal, the departing student programs assistant director, with an orchid on behalf of the senior class.

Major in Global Affairs, Transnational European Studies

Concentration

Emma Ackerley

Peter Di Re

Peter Ferraro

Ciara Fitter

Javier Nater

Jack Ramsey

Minor in European Studies

Britton Brindle

Adeline Chappuis

Sabrina Curran

Eoghan Fay

Gabe Gelke

Isabelle Grassel

Daniel Keegan

Ava Larsen

Christian McKernan

Nicholas Ruhling

Allison Sharp

Victoria Torres Nunez

Connor Tsikitas

Number of graduating seniors class of 2023

The answers to the trivia questions from page 3 are Gibraltar and Sardinia.

Eoghan Fay receives the J. Robert Wegs prize from Clemens Sedmak, director of the Nanovic Institute.

indsay Burgess ’24 describes the Nanovic Institute as “the focal point of my career discernment and personal development while at Notre Dame.” With majors in German and science business and a European studies minor, Burgess’ first encounter with the institute was through a European studies class on Tolerance and Toleration taught by its director, Clemens Sedmak. The course sparked her interest in engaging directly with challenges in Europe today, and the institute has provided her with opportunities to do so through programs and projects designed in the spirit of empathy, service, and respectful listening. During the 2022 summer break, Burgess participated in the Serving (in) Europe program, the institute’s flagship service learning program that seeks to engage Notre Dame students in pressing social issues facing the European continent today. She was one of five Notre Dame undergraduates to intern with Caritas Bulgaria in Sofia, where she supported and observed the organization’s work with refugees and other vulnerable populations. Reflecting on this experience, Burgess says, “The conversations that I

had with the other four students in my program revealed to me that this experience fostered a deeper insight and understanding for all of us in different ways.” In the summer of 2023, Burgess returned to Europe and the Caritas community. Supported by a Nanovic internship support grant, she traveled to Germany and worked at Caritas Heidelberg in its social outreach and management sector. Burgess has also been part of the student team working on “Writing the War in Ukraine,” a project that aims to amplify voices from Ukraine and deepen the understanding of the power of creative writing as a vehicle for bearing witness to the war. This Nanovic undergraduate research builds upon the institute’s previous project on Ukrainian art and will result in an online exhibition in the fall of 2023.

Of her studies and work with the institute, Burgess says, “I am so grateful for the efforts of everyone at Nanovic who encourages student involvement in such meaningful and important experiences. The Nanovic Institute’s programs not only foster the education of students but also their formation as empathetic and understanding people.” ♦

“The conversations that I had with the other four students in my program revealed to me that this experience fostered a deeper insight and understanding for all of us in different ways.”

“While many experts have looked ahead to new and innovative materials, few have looked back to historic buildings, which have already stood the test of time.”

- Nathan Walz ’24

Heritage in the Kiln Renewal and Sustainability Through Traditional Brickmaking

What follows is an edited version of the opening to a story that appeared on Notre Dame Stories in January 2022. To read the full, original version of “Heritage in the kiln: Renewal and sustainability through traditional brickmaking” use the QR code below.

Have you ever considered the bricks in the walls that surround you, the walls of your home, your classroom, or your office? Alumni of the University of Notre Dame probably know the story behind the “Notre Dame Brick” that gives some of the oldest buildings on campus their distinctive buff-yellow hue. But beyond a handful of specific historical instances, how many of us have ever thought about where the bricks in our walls came from, the origin of their raw clay, the process by which they were molded or the kiln in which they were fired?

During the summer break in 2022, two School of Architecture students, Jack Harrington ’23 and Nathan Walz ’24, received a summer research grant from the Nanovic Institute to conduct research into traditional brickmaking in the central Italian region of Umbria. Their work in Italy, and back at Notre Dame, provokes such questions about our built environment, the structures we have inherited from the past, created ourselves, and those we will build in the future. In January 2023, the Nanovic Institute worked with Notre Dame Stories to share the students’ research with a wide audience.

Harrington and Walz traveled to the village of Castel Viscardo, near the city of Orvieto, in June 2022 to document the process of traditional brickmaking at Fornace Bernasconi, a historic kiln now in its second generation of production. Led by master brickmaker Luigi Bernasconi, the facility is renowned for its bricks, tiles, and other terra cotta elements that have helped restore and preserve some of Italy’s most treasured structures including the Colosseum and the imperial building on the Palatine.

Bernasconi masonry is crafted using centuries-old knowledge that has been passed through generations of brickmakers and is much sought after. In recent decades, architectural conservationists have realized that modern materials, such as cement, resin, and steel, are ineffective and often counterproductive to

the restoration of historic buildings and monuments. The School of Gladiators in Pompeii, for example, collapsed under the weight of concrete intended as reinforcement. Historical techniques and materials, such as Bernasconi’s bricks, absorb stresses, breathe and contract in the same way as masonry that has stood for centuries, even millennia, and are vital for the sustainable restoration of ancient constructions.

Harrington and Walz share an interest in traditional crafts and material culture and a passion for sustainability, preservation, and renewal in architecture and masonry. Sustainable design is a critical challenge facing the field of architecture in the 21st century and it depends significantly on the materials used in a building’s construction. For these two builders-intraining, the study of historic masonry is a window of opportunity. “While many experts have looked ahead to new and innovative materials,” Walz says, “few have looked back to historic buildings, which have already stood the test of time.”

At Fornace Bernasconi, Harrington and Walz undertook the task of capturing the knowledge behind the production of historic building materials, a knowledge that is both tangible, in the form of physical equipment, and intangible, undocumented know-how passed down through generations. The students' work in both Castel Viscardo and back in Walsh Family Hall reflects an approach that has blended skill, precision, and diligence with immersion, presence, and empathy. In the process, Harrington and Walz have realized the importance of context, local knowledge, resources, and heritage. But they have also identified principles around sustainability, conservation, and innovation that might be applied more universally, including in South Bend, Indiana. ♦

Jack Harrington ’23

Nathan Walz ’24

Read more at go.nd.edu/heritagekiln

LEFT: An exhibition in the British Library calling attention to housing inequality.

Photo by the Ida Addo.

BELOW: Ida Addo in front of the Meeting Place statue in St. Pancras.

“When your sources are derived only through a computer screen, the narrative. . . can be one-dimensional. Living out the research bridges the gap that exists where data has not caught up with the lived experiences of the people.”

The Experiences of the Windrush Generation

Nanovic Spring Research in the London Urbanscape

BY IDA ADDO '24

The story below is taken from a Nanovic Navigator post by Ida Addo ’24, an economics major with a minor in the Hesburgh Program in Public Service. In March 2023, Addo spent one week in London, supported by a Nanovic Institute spring break grant, conducting research in the Black Cultural Archives, the British Library, and elsewhere for her capstone project: “London Urbanscape and Policies: Their Effect on the Economic State of the Windrush Generation.”

We have all met that kid, the one whose nosiness and curiosity about their neighbors and community residents calls for an automatic eye roll. With such kids, every drive or casual stroll provokes chatter, as they pester you with questions from “Oh mom, why does their house look like that?” to “Why are the people who live there different from those that live here?” or “I don’t see her grandmother anymore, where did she go?”

The temptation to silence this kid rises with each question. But hear me out! What if I told you that their observations are not pointless?

Is it not important that we challenge what has become normalized so we may reconsider the conventions and institutions that continue to marginalize certain people more than others? I became that kid when I discovered that accessibility, context, and economic mobility lay at the heart of human rights and the recognition of human dignity.

The article “Can You Move to Opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration” (American Economic Review, February 2022), by the American economist Ellora Derenoncourt, sparked my curiosity to explore the effects of migration and neighborhoods on intergenerational socioeconomic mobility. As I studied the intricate link between poverty and access to housing, employment, and education, I had the urge to challenge the normal. After reading Derenoncourt’s article, my next question was “What are the parallels between the Great Migration and the Windrush generation?” I wanted to understand the similarities and differences between the experiences of the approximately six million African Americans who migrated north from the American South in the middle decades of the 20th century and those of Afro-Caribbean migrants to the UK during a similar era.

My research follows the seismic demographic change from 1948 to 1971 with the entry of Afro-Caribbeans to London and its key policy responses. I took the unsettling observations of the immigrant experience

that I wrestled with a step further and turned them into research questions to understand the impact of the London urbanscape and its policies on the economic state of the Windrush generation and their descendants.

Derenoncourt drew some connections between place and the economic earnings of Black migrants that moved to northern American cities from the South during the Great Migration. I particularly focused on housing and employment as critical economic factors that reveal hindrances to the successful economic development of the Black British population at large. As I walked the alleyways of Hackney, the graffiti on the walls, the positioning of Brutalist social housing structures, and historic pictures of bombed-out homes that early West Indies immigrants occupied animated the plights of the Windrush generation. There, my questions like “Who owns this house?” and “Did their grandparents live here too?” were not so odd. The multiplex answers to these questions do not solely tell an economic tale. They reveal pernicious colonial legacies and unfairness in the British rule of law, adding layers of complexity to the lives of these immigrants.

My time in London has taught me not to silence the nosy kid within that prompted me to ask difficult questions. To engage in successful research with this caliber of question is to view the city as a living and breathing being.

When your sources are derived only through a computer screen, the narrative uncovered by your research can be one-dimensional. Living out the research bridges the gap that exists where data has not caught up with the lived experiences of the people. ♦

Read the full article about Addo’s research on the Windrush generation’s experiences of housing discrimination, educational inequality, and intergenerational poverty, as well as the richness of Afro-Caribbean culture in 21st-century London on the Nanovic website.

Ida Addo '24

Photo courtesy of AnBryce Scholars Initiative

Ukrainian Art as Protest and Resilience Nanovic Student Research

In February 2022, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies launched a new in-person and digital exhibition, “Ukrainian Art as Protest and Resilience.” The exhibition presents a series of works, created by Ukrainian artists during the war, accompanied by analytical insights provided by Notre Dame undergraduate students who conducted research during the 2022-23 winter break. The exhibition showcases many different types of artistic work, including digital, sacred, and street art; music; fashion; and art by Ukrainian children.

In an introduction to the project, Yaryna Pysko, a Ukrainian master of global affairs student in governance and policy at the Keough School of Global Affairs and an advisor on the project, writes:

“The exhibition is a chance to witness the creation of contemporary Ukrainian art as war became an integral part of day-to-day reality. It provides a lens through which one can take a peek, from the point of view of Ukrainian artists and their allies, at the new routine and adjustments Ukrainians have made to accommodate the realities of war. These artists reflect the emotions of ordinary people, many of whom suffer through unimaginable atrocities.”

In a discussion about the project’s background, Abigail Lewis, incoming director of undergraduate studies at the Nanovic Institute, writes:

“This exhibition seeks to highlight Ukrainian protest and resilience during the invasion by Russia and how public art has become a medium of resistance, traumatic mediation, and expressions of identity. Faced with the threat of cultural annihilation, Ukrainian artists have brought Ukrainian identity, history, and culture to the fore…

“…This exhibition invites you to process current events under the microscope of individual experiences. The artworks allow you to live the emotions with the artist and take part in Ukraine’s national resistance.”

The outcome of an undergraduate research project, the exhibition opened the day before a commemoration of the one-year anniversary of the

Russian invasion of Ukraine that took place in the Forum of Nanovic Hall on Thursday, February 23, 2023, hosted in partnership with students from Ukrainian Catholic University, the Ukraine Society, Campus Ministry, and the Office of the President. The in-person exhibition remained on display through mid-March and the digital exhibition is still available online. ♦

View the exhibition at go.nd.edu/ce06fl.

“St Javelin” by Chris Shaw. Image used with permission from Chris Shaw and saintjavelin.com

Student researchers

Emma Ackerley ’23

Clare Barloon ’24

Peter Di Re ’23

Libby Eggemeier ’25

Michael Ellis ’24

Anna Gazewood ’24

Jacqueline McKenna ’23

Bella Mittleman ’24

Erin Tutau ’24

Felicity Wong ’24

Graduate student advisor

Yaryna Pysko MGA ’24

BELOW: Yaryna Pysko, a Master of Global Affairs (MGA) student and advisor for the research project, talks about the exhibition with Clemens Sedmak, director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and professor of social ethics.

“Ukrainian icons and other items of cultural and religious significance have historically faced persecution and destruction, including during the Soviet era, and now Ukrainian culture is once again facing threat of erasure.”

- Emma Ackerley ’23

LEFT: Mural by street artist C215 of a young girl in a vinok (traditional Ukrainian flower crown) in Lviv, Ukraine. Photograph courtesy of Yaryna Pysko.

NEWS ROUNDUP

How does Nanovic “Elevate”?

The Nanovic Institute is increasing its visibility and profile as a research and teaching institute, developing research projects in collaboration with partners at Notre Dame and beyond. These collaborative, interdisciplinary, and international research projects attract external funding and contribute to the field of European studies in meaningful ways.

– Korey

Assistant Professor, Department of American Studies, University of Notre Dame

“The elevation of Nanovic’s research profile makes it easier for me and my colleagues to broker academic connections, establish professional relationships, and to bring new and important scholarship back to campus.”

Garibaldi

Transnational France

Since 2020, the Nanovic Institute has supported a research cluster on “Transnational France,” which brings together Notre Dame faculty and students working across disciplines on France and the francophone world with a particular interest in the question of what it means to welcome—or reject—the “stranger,” whether these strangers are enemies or friends, and whether they are our “neighbor” or a threat to our way of life. In the last academic year, this group has been co-chaired by two Nanovic faculty fellows: Sarah Shortall, assistant professor of history, and Sonja Stojanovic, assistant

professor of French and francophone studies. In addition to regular meetings at the Nanovic Institute, the research cluster organized two events of particular note: a lecture by Udi Greenberg, associate professor of history at Dartmouth College, titled “Christian Sex and the Birth of Religious Pluralism in Twentieth-Century Europe,” and a lecture by Daniel Nabil Maroun, assistant professor of French at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign, titled “Police Violence in France: At the Intersection of Race Blindness and Universalism.”

Gallery of European Studies

To celebrate the many achievements of the Nanovic Faculty Fellows during the 2022-23 academic year, the Nanovic Institute organized the Gallery of European Studies on April 24, 2023. The annual exhibition, held this year in the forum of Nanovic Hall, showcased the publications, awards and honors, creative projects, and other accomplishments of our extraordinary faculty fellows.

During this event, the institute also announced the 2023 Faculty Fellow of the Year, Yury P. Avvakumov, associate professor in the Department of Theology. Professor Avvakumov was instrumental in helping the institute plan many events and research projects centered on Ukraine throughout the year and has been an invaluable member of its faculty committee.

Yury P. Avvakumov receiving the faculty fellow of the year award in 2023 from Clemens Sedmak.

Sarah Shortall

Sonja Stojanovic

Neighboring doors in the village of Ampus in Provence, France on May 19, 2016. (Flickr CC BYSA 2.0/Spencer Means)

Honoring Faculty Fellow Achievements

This year the extraordinary Nanovic faculty fellows continued to make exceptional contributions and receive distinctions and awards. Listed below are only a few of our fellows' many achievements of 2022-2023, including significant publications, awards, promotions, and more. The institute congratulates all of its fellows for their incredible work in the past year and for contributing to this intellectual community.

Faculty Fellows win NEH grants

This year, two Nanovic Institute faculty fellows won competitive fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

John Betz, associate professor of theology, received a NEH Scholarly Editions and Scholarly Translations grant to produce a critical edition of F.W.J. von Schelling’s original 1831-32 Munich lectures on the philosophy of revelation.

Sophie White, professor of American studies, received an NEH Public Scholars grant to continue her work on a book project Strangers Within: A Cultural and Genomic History of Red Hair (forthcoming).

Faculty Fellow Promotions

JoAnn DellaNeva, promoted to Emerita Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Stephen Fallon, promoted to Emeritus John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities, and Emeritus Professor of English

Rev. Daniel Groody, C.S.C., promoted to Professor of Theology

Essaka Joshua, promoted to Professor of English

Mary M. Keys, promoted to Professor of Political Science

Margaret Meserve, named Vice President and Associate Provost for Academic Space and Support

Luc Reydams, promoted to Emeritus Faculty of Political Science

Robin Rhodes, promoted to Professor Emeritus of Art History

Daniel Schlosberg, promoted to Professor of the Practice of Piano

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, promoted to Professor of English

Warren von Eschenbach, promoted to Professor of the Practice in the Technology Ethics Center

John Betz

Sophie White

Faculty Fellow Awards

Paolo Carozza, professor of law, received the 2023 Faculty Award, which singles out the faculty member who, in the opinion of his or her colleagues, has contributed outstanding service to the University of Notre Dame, such as through leadership activities, mentoring faculty colleagues, or exemplary dedication to students.

Stephen Fallon, the emeritus John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities, and emeritus professor of English, received the 2023 President’s Award, given to a faculty member or administrator for distinguished service to the University over an extended period.

Anton Juan, professor of theatre and film director, received the 2023 Reinhold Niebuhr Award, given annually to a faculty member or administrator whose body of academic work (e.g., articles, books, creative works) and life promote or exemplify the area of social justice in modern life.

Other Faculty Achievements

Jeremy Phillip Brown, the Jordan H. Kapson Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology, Claire “CJ” Jones, the William Payden Associate Professor of German, and Denis Robichaud, the John and Patrice Kelly Associate Professor of Liberal Studies, received interdisciplinary research grants from the Medieval Institute, the Center for Italian Studies, and the Rome Global Gateway.

Patrick Griffin, the Madden-Hennebry Professor of History and director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, received the highest academic honor in Ireland, being named an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Peter Jeffery, the Michael P. Grace Chair in Medieval Studies, director of sacred music at Notre Dame, and professor of musicology and ethnomusicology, was named a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, an honor representing “major long-term scholarly achievement within the field of Medieval Studies.”

Alison Rice, chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, professor of French and francophone studies, and concurrent professor of gender studies, was featured in the 2023 Women Lead initiative at Notre Dame (go.nd.edu/a912e5), recognizing her significant contributions across campus during her career.

Jeremy Phillip Brown

Paolo Carozza

Stephen Fallon Claire "CJ" Jones

Patrick Griffin

Peter Jeffery

Anton Juan

Alison Rice

Denis Robichaud

Faculty Fellow Publications

Margot Fassler

Keough-Hesburgh Professor Emerita of Music History and Liturgy

Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard’s Illuminated Scivias, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

Korey Garibaldi

Assistant Professor of American Studies

Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America, Princeton University Press, 2023.

Rev. Daniel Groody, C.S.C. Professor of Theology

A Theology of Migration: The Bodies of Refugees and the Body of Christ, Orbis Books, 2022. Foreword written by Pope Francis.

Vittorio Hösle

Paul G. Kimball Professor of Arts and Letters, and Professor of Philosophy and Political Science

Goethe und Dickens als christliche Dichter, Verlag Karl Alber, 2022.

Mit dem Rücken zu Russland: Der Ukrainekrieg und die Fehler des Westens, Verlag Karl Alber, 2022.

Debra Javeline

Associate Professor of Political Science

After Violence: Russia’s Beslan School Massacre and the Peace that Followed, Oxford University Press, 2023.

Robin M. Jensen

Patrick O'Brien Professor of Theology

From Idols to Icons: The Emergence of Christian Devotional Images in Late Antiquity, University of California Press, 2022.

Anton Juan Professor of Theatre and Film Director

FILM: Amon Banwa sa Lawud (Our Island of Mangrove Moons)

Emilia Justyna Powell

Professor of Political Science and Law

The Peaceful Resolution of Territorial and Maritime Disputes, co-authored by Krista E. Wiegand, Oxford University Press, 2023.

Mark Roche

Rev. Edmund Joyce, C.S.C., Professor of German Language and Literature and Professor of Philosophy

Alfred Hitchcock: Filmmaker and Philosopher, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Sarah Shortall Assistant Professor of History

ARTICLE: “From the Three Bodies of Christ to the King’s Two Bodies: The Theological Origins of Secularization Theory,” Modern Intellectual History, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Sonja Stojanovic

Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French, Liverpool University Press, 2023.

‘Taking Up Space’: Women at Work in Contemporary France, co-edited by Siham Bouamer, University of Wales Press with distribution by University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Yasmin Solomonescu

Notre Dame du Lac Associate Professor of English

CHAPTER: “Prone Minds and Extended Selves: The Cenci,” Romanticism and Consciousness Revisited, edited by Richard C. Sha and Joel Faflak, Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Samir Younés

Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs and Curriculum, and Professor of Architecture

Architectural Type and Character: A Practical Guide to a History of Architecture, co-authored by Carroll William Westfall, Routledge Press, 2022.

Vittorio Hösle

Der Ukrainekrieg und die Fehler des Westens Mit einem Geleitwort von Theo Waigel

Mit dem Rücken zu Russland

t has been a busy, productive year for Korey Garibaldi. The assistant professor of American studies who specializes in the history of the book and transnational humanism published his first book, Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2023), in the fall of 2022. He also generously carved out time in this busy schedule for his role as a faculty fellow of the Nanovic Institute, playing a central role in elevating the institute’s research priorities and public-facing programming in the 2022-23 academic year.

As a Nanovic faculty fellow since 2020, Garibaldi has supported many of the institute’s most important programs for students, faculty, and the wider academic community. This has included evaluating undergraduate travel grant applications and serving on the second-round review committee for the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies. In February 2023, Garibaldi also introduced and facilitated a discussion of the inaugural lecture in the Decolonizing Scholarship series by Lewis R. Gordon. Garibaldi’s most significant contribution to the life of the institute over the last year, however, was as a lead organizer of the “Reimagining Europe from Its Peripheries” signature conference in April 2023. Along with his co-organizers, Francisco E. Robles, assistant professor of English, and Perin

Gürel, associate professor of American studies, Garibaldi brought together a multidisciplinary conference of scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to examine the political and cultural “structuring” of European belonging from the perspective of its ever-shifting, often-precarious, peripheries—and its peripheral subjects. The conference significantly elevated the institute’s strategic emphasis on enlarging the map, decentering the center, and deepening collective understanding of the lived experience of all people in Europe, including those marginalized by geography, poverty, policies of citizenship, and difference.

Reflecting on faculty involvement with the Nanovic Institute, Garibaldi says, “The elevation of Nanovic’s research profile makes it easier for me and my colleagues to broker academic connections, establish professional relationships, and bring new and important scholarship back to campus. Notre Dame is a crucial hub for humanistic inquiry. But we can’t rest on our laurels. This is why I consider it an honor to join Nanovic’s prolific, intellectually rigorous faculty fellows in broadening the vision of European studies at and beyond our university.”

An online symposium on peripheries—aimed at bringing new voices into conversations inspired by the conference—has been planned for Oc tober 2023. ♦

“Notre Dame is a crucial hub for humanistic inquiry. But we can’t rest on our laurels. This is why I consider it an honor to join Nanovic’s prolific, intellectually rigorous faculty fellows in broadening the vision of European studies at and beyond our university.”

Scholarship on Women’s Writing Recognized by the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies

This year the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies continued its legacy of recognizing exceptional scholars and bringing them to campus. The 2022 winner in the humanities for her book Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) was Pamela Cheek, professor of French and comparative literature at the University of New Mexico. Cheek received the Laura Shannon Prize at Notre Dame on November 3, 2022, at which time she delivered her prize lecture titled “The Literary ‘Me Too’ of the 18th Century: Women’s Writing and the Capital of Virtue.”

In this lecture, she gave a fascinating, erudite account of how women writers navigated a literary marketplace that was in formation, developing distinctive codes and narrative devices that allowed them to articulate, among other things, women’s experiences of sexual violence and rape. While the promise of this 18th-century literary means of articulating what we now call “gaslighting” was ultimately lost, Cheek explained that these codes left a powerful legacy for understanding power and narratives — how we tell stories and who gets to tell stories — in the past and today. The following is an excerpt from an event brief of Cheek’s lecture, which can be read in full on the Nanovic website.

go.nd.edu/fb8ef3

Communicating “Gaslighting” in the 18th Century

In the course of Cheek’s research, she began to notice newer narrative devices being used repeatedly in 18th-century writing by women. These newer codes, she argued, held promise. In a literary marketplace where a “capital of virtue” dictated polite literary forms and prevented women writers from explicitly describing sexual behavior, stories of rape and sexual violence against women were interpreted and overwritten by men. Cheek described how new narrative devices offered a way for women to challenge that hegemony and communicate stories of violence against their group.

The publication of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1758) was a watershed moment in how sexual violence could be articulated in the “polite” British novel. Through context and elision, which Cheek describes as a “dot dot dot” technique, Richardson managed the rape of his central character for a polite audience. He successfully evaded any narrative codes that might have aligned his text with contemporary romances and novels, forms that were considered indecent and “inflaming” for a reading public that included growing numbers of young women. Instead, Richardson weaved otherwise shocking sexual violence into a new “polite” form of a novel that retained aesthetic and market value, explicitly decent and implicitly salacious. Cheek displayed one important element of Richardson’s depiction of the attack: Clarissa Harlowe’s post-rape letter to her attacker and captor, Robert Lovelace. In scattered typography, Clarissa’s disconnected thoughts are strewn across the page, an innovative printing technique and narrative device that vividly contrasts the “madness” of her post-rape papers with the mental clarity of the lucid, stylized letters she writes earlier in the novel. For the benefit of a “polite” audience, Cheek explained, Clarissa’s lack of reason and self-awareness exonerates her from any complicity, even after the fact, in the sexual encounter.

This Richardsonian articulation of rape, Cheek explained, presented a dilemma for women who wished to write about sexual violence, women who inhabited a world in which the lived experiences of their group included unwanted sexual attention and violence. Women writers were caught between two stools: if they depicted sexual violence in explicit ways, their work would be identified as whorish, pornographic, and aesthetically inferior, but if they emulated Richardson’s polite sentimental novel in which the victim’s account of sexual abuse is devoid of reason and clarity, their protagonist would, like Clarissa, have no control over the narrative surrounding her rape.

In response, Cheek argues, women writers developed a new, more complex strategy: articulating “gaslighting,” demonstrating that power rests with whoever controls the way a story is heard and understood. To illustrate, Cheek used the example of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) in which the author presented a female protagonist, Arabella, whose fear of sexual exploitation and abuse is repeatedly mocked and dismissed by the men who surround her as silly, irrational, and a result of reading too many romances. As the story develops, however, Lennox shows that Arabella is under constant threat of exploitation and sexual manipulation by her uncle and a host of suitors who wish to seize control of her fortune, her only leverage in a world where unmarried women are generally powerless. Cheek argued that by showing how these men dismiss Arabella’s credible fears as delusion, Lennox, with other women writers, “discovered narrative means of communicating ‘gaslighting’ — accounts of women who would tell their stories of abuse only for these stories to be dismissed as impossible because of their silliness, their madness, their lack of competence.” ♦

The winner of the 2023 prize in history and social sciences is Stella Ghervas, professor and the Eugen Weber Chair in Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles, for her book Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Harvard University Press, 2021). She is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Notre Dame on November 2, 2023. Read more about her book and scholarship at go.nd.edu/d3e476.

2023 Silver Medalists

Emily Greble, professor of history and German, Russian, and East European studies at Vanderbilt University, for her book Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2021). Read more at go.nd.edu/5bf167.

Mira L. Siegelberg, university associate professor in the history of international political thought at Cambridge University, for her book Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press, 2020). Read more at go.nd.edu/976496

2023 Laura Shannon Prize Winner

Dignity and Development Conference

Sedmak and Sajó

Clemens Sedmak, director of the Nanovic Institute and professor of social ethics, joined the Honorable András Sajó, a former judge on the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), for a conversation about the judicial history of human dignity in Europe during a conference on Dignity and Development, hosted by the Keough School of Global Affairs.

The ECHR was established in 1959 with the responsibility of interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights. In this role, it has shaped legal, political, and even popular understandings of human dignity through its rulings in milestone cases. The court includes 46 judges, one from each state that is a party to the Convention on Human Rights, which itself came into effect in 1953. As Sedmak explained, in conversing with Sajó, a high-ranking European official who deals with

matters of human dignity in Europe, the Nanovic Institute was fulfilling its mission as Notre Dame’s connection to Europe and a part of the Keough School, with its focus on integral human development. By identifying Europe’s place in human dignity conversations, the institute participates in ongoing dialogue and research.

The Milestone Cases regarding Human Dignity before the ECHR

At the outset, Sajó emphasized the potentially surprising fact that the European Convention on Human Rights does not explicitly mention “dignity” in its foundational text. This omission, he said, is a strange one, given that the convention was largely written in response to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). In that declaration, “dignity” (in relation to the human person) is mentioned in both the Preamble and Article 1. It is also surprising because of the power that human dignity can wield within ECHR deliberations. Sajó explained that it frequently served as “an argument when you would really like to silence others, or you would really like to silence a state. It is the ultimate idea. It is really inconvenient to argue against dignity.”

The case of Pretty vs. the United Kingdom (2002) helped Sajó illustrate the point that, even while human dignity is a powerful ideological concept, its legal imprecision means that the court’s responses to a claim that an individual’s dignity has been violated have varied. Diane Pretty, who suffered from an incurable, degenerative motor neuron disease, had petitioned the UK’s High Court to protect

You can watch the full conversation between Sedmak and Sajó at https://youtu.be/ C5cugOJKpnQ.

Nanovic faculty fellow Diane Desierto, Professor of Law and Global Affairs, in discussion with the Honorable András Sajó.

her husband from prosecution if he assisted in his wife’s suicide. When her claim was denied by the British court, Pretty applied to the ECHR citing the British court’s violation of her human dignity.

In its unanimous decision, the European court agreed that Pretty’s case was admissible as a matter of dignity in the sense of self-determination, but it found no violation of the Convention and denied her case. Sajó explained that the court’s recognition that human dignity underpins all rights is ideological, but in practice, there are specific rules around how the Convention on Human Rights is interpreted and legally applied. Pretty’s case was denied, in part, because the Convention does not spell out a right to die.

To counterbalance any implication that human dignity carries no weight in the European court, Sajó explained that when it comes to torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, the court’s interpretation of the Convention provides sufficient protection of dignity. To demonstrate, he discussed a case concerning prison conditions and the personal space to which an individual is entitled. Responding to an application from a 72-year-old incarcerated man, the majority of the court found that if his personal space was 3 square meters, this was adequate and humane. The court reasoned that the applicant could leave his cell at certain times to visit the basketball court.

Sajó dissented from this judgment and felt that such treatment was undignified, cruel, and unusual, and noted that the court was failing to recognize the particularities of a petition by an older man who was less likely to participate in a basketball game. As regards the court’s consideration of human dignity, Sajó made the point that the majority’s acknowledgment that the basketball court offered the applicant a respite from his cell betrayed its recognition that

3-square-meter confinement areas violate human dignity. Although this judgment, in Sajó’s opinion, did not protect the dignity of the individual, the principle of dignity was still at the heart of how the case was deliberated.

Within the court at Strasbourg, the ideological commitment to human dignity must contend with pressures from member states, rules around interpretation, and understandings of “the spirit” of the convention that might be shaped, as is human nature, by the judges’ personal beliefs. But Sajó’s discussion reflected that many judges still hold a conviction — often, as Sedmak noted, deeply philosophical — that every human retains the right to insist upon their dignity and to hope that it will be protected.

Sedmak illustrated this point by quoting from an ECHR opinion, which Sajó was party to, on the topic of life sentences for incarcerated persons:

“Long and deserved though their prison sentences may be, they retained the right to hope that someday they may have atoned for the wrongs which they have committed, they ought not to be deprived entirely of such hope. To deny them the experience of hope would be to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity and to do that would be degrading.”

The Dignity and Development conference, held March 2-3, 2023, focused on how to respond when acts of trauma and injustice are committed by those in power. It focused on three core areas of response: courts (as exemplified in Judge Sajó’s contribution), grassroots initiatives, and international politics. The conference included both in-person and virtual components to maximize participation. ♦

Pictured left to right: Clemens Sedmak, Diane Desierto (Professor of Law and Global Affairs at Notre Dame Law School), Imani Daud Aboud (President of the African Court of Human & Peoples’ Rights), Scott Appleby (Professor of History and the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs), Judge András Sajó, and Thomas Mustillo (Associate Professor of Global Affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs).

Photo credit: Steve Toepp.

Portraits of Leadership and Personal Encounter

The Nanovic Institute’s signature events in the 2022-23 academic year focused on enriching participants’ understanding of the war in Ukraine, Russian aggression, and the implications of this conflict for Europe and the world. The distinguished guests who spoke as part of the Nanovic Forum and Keeley Vatican Lecture Series shared several commonalities, particularly their support for Ukraine. Perhaps most strikingly, each speaker’s insights, perspectives, and advice demonstrated the unique wisdom gained through direct personal encounters with events and individuals that have proven, for better or worse, influential and, at times, historic. With their collective experience as former heads of state and highlevel diplomats, the three speakers emphasized to the Notre Dame community the stakes of the current crisis in Eastern Europe with urgency, clarity, and passion.

In September, Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, apostolic nuncio to Great Britain and the Titular Archbishop of Rebellum, delivered the annual Keeley Vatican Lecture. This series, generously supported by Terrence R. Keeley, has been held since 2004 and seeks to deepen Notre Dame’s connection to the Holy See by bringing distinguished representatives from the Vatican to Notre Dame. In a lecture that had to take place virtually owing to the funeral of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the Most Reverend Gugerotti shared his experience as a Vatican diplomat and discussed his contacts with Saint John Paul II at the fall of the Soviet Union. These recollections, he explained, were unknown to the public before the lecture and reflected “the sensitivity of that pontiff, son of the Polish people and an internal witness to the Communist history.”

Archbishop Gugerotti’s initial contact with Saint John Paul II was during the young priest’s time as an official for the Vatican’s Congregation of the Oriental Churches and his involvement with the pontiff’s effort to help the victims of the catastrophic earthquake that hit the northern region of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic on December 7, 1988. Gugerotti recalled a long evening spent with the Pope sharing details of the destruction and suffering the delegates had witnessed in places like the city of Leninakan — now named Gyumri. He described their pensive but inquisitive host as “struck by the stories of that immense tragedy [and] we realized that human and pastoral interest [was] interwoven with a special attention due to the fact that we [were] talking about the Soviet Union.” This was, the Archbishop continued, “a world well-known to him and which, in his [native] Poland, was the essential political reference point in those times.” Gugerotti’s reflections on personal encounters — both his encounter with Saint John Paul II and the Pope’s personal witness to the Cold War — made for a deeply moving, insightful lecture.

Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti

Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović

Margvelashvili

In October, the former President of the Republic of Croatia (2015-2020) Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović gave the first of two Nanovic Forum lectures in the 2022-23 academic year. Since 2011, the Nanovic Forum, sponsored by Robert and Elizabeth Nanovic, has brought European leaders from a variety of academic, cultural, and professional fields to campus to discuss issues of major importance in Europe. In her lecture, titled “War in Ukraine, Peace in Europe? Geopolitics, Economics, and Security after Russia’s Invasion,” GrabarKitarović gave her insights on Russian aggression and the war in Ukraine, imparting a valuable perspective as the former leader of a country with a history of communism and a complex relationship with the Soviet Union. Her experience in several governmental and diplomatic posts, including to the EU and the United States, and as NATO assistant secretary-general for public diplomacy, also inform her view of contemporary geo-politics. Perhaps most strikingly, Grabar-Kitarović’s interpretations of the war, destruction, and suffering in Ukraine today are shaped by her coming of age during the Yugoslav Wars and the Croatian War of Independence, which meant, in her own words, “basically maturing through war, conflict, [and] reconciliation.”

Grabar-Kitarović delivered a lecture on the current situation in Ukraine that was both detailed and took a wide-angle view of the diplomatic and geopolitical stakes. She also addressed the question of what might happen next, expressing the opinion that the war is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, in part because there will have to be a negotiated solution, which she believed that neither side was motivated to consider. In this context, she laid out some guiding priorities for both global leaders and ordinary citizens as they continue to oppose Russia’s actions and remain firm in their support for Ukraine’s sovereignty. Grabar-Kitarović closed her lecture with a reflection on the fragility of freedom, a lesson that Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovans, and now Ukrainians have learned the hard way:

“The fact that we have peace [and stability] in our countries,” she warned, “does not mean [an] absence of threat. It means there are men and women out there working so hard to secure our peace and stability, and that peace can never be taken for granted.”

In February 2023, Giorgi Margvelashvili, former president of the Republic of Georgia (2013-2018), gave the academic year’s second Nanovic Forum lecture titled “Russian Aggression in Ukraine and Eastern Europe: Post-Soviet Bloc Politics and Consequences.” Margvelashvili shared his unique perspectives on the issue of Russia’s belligerent foreign policy, particularly toward its nearest neighbors, over the last three decades, insights that have been formed in part by his tenure as the leader of the first sovereign state to be attacked and violated by the post-Soviet Russian Federation in the 2008 RussoGeorgian War. As an entry point into his discussion, Margvelashvili recalled the years following the end of the Cold War in 1991 and raised a difficult and poignant question about the mistakes made during that post-war process: “Did we get a better humankind?”

In his lecture, Margvelashvili provided his valuable perspective, both as a Georgian citizen and then president, on the failure of the international community to adequately stand up to Russian aggression in recent decades. In particular, he recounted the painful sense of abandonment felt by the Georgian people when Russia occupied 20% of Georgia’s territory with military force, carried out ethnic cleansing, and declared two new nations within the country’s jurisdiction in 2008. Western approaches to Russia’s extra-territorial incursions have shifted in response, Margvelashvili argued, to the remarkable show of courage and strength by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his people, but the path towards a Russian defeat remains unclear. He called on world leaders to avoid ideological hypocrisy, one of the reasons why, he believes, “we have been unable to make a better and more secure world for ourselves and for our children.”

While the public lectures packed auditoriums and attracted large online audiences, Nanovic’s signature event speakers also engaged with Notre Dame students and faculty in other settings. GrabarKitarović and Margvelashvili gave of their time generously and engaged with undergraduate and graduate students of European studies in classrooms and over lunch and coffee; they also enjoyed dinner with Nanovic faculty fellows and staff. In these ways, Nanovic’s signature lecture series continues to bring distinguished European cultural, political, and faith leaders into conversation with a cross-section of the Notre Dame community. ♦

Giorgi

Portraits of Europe from Its Peripheries

“What does it mean to work with centers and the challenge of decentering the center, margins and borderlands, in-between spaces and marginalized peoples, languages, cultures, traditions?” These were some of the questions posed by Clemens Sedmak, professor of social ethics and director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, as he opened the conference “Reimagining Europe from Its Peripheries,” held at the University of Notre Dame on April 27-29, 2023. While the Nanovic Institute, which is part of the Keough School of Global Affairs, provided what Sedmak described as the “hardware” and logistical support for this conference, the “software,” the intellectual substance, was secured by three Notre Dame colleagues: Korey Garibaldi, assistant professor of American studies and Nanovic faculty fellow, Perin Gürel, associate professor of American studies and Nanovic faculty fellow, and Francisco Robles, assistant professor of English literature.

Over three days of presentations and discussions, this multidisciplinary meeting brought together scholars, policymakers, and practitioners from the U.S. and Europe. Their goal was to examine how political and cultural forces structure belonging in Europe and to do so from the perspective of its shifting and precarious peripheries and peripheralized people. The conference theme reflected the institute’s commitment, laid out in its strategic plan for 20212026, to encompass the lived experience of all people in Europe, including those marginalized by geography, poverty, policies of citizenship, and difference, in order to explore the humanity of those people and places Pope Francis has called “the peripheries” (Evangelii Gaudium 20).

Three distinguished speakers delivered keynotes, beginning with an opening lecture by the French-Algerian author, art historian, and curator Zahia Rahmani, director of the Art History and Globalization Research Program at

Interspersed with the keynotes were four sessions that focused on:

The ways in which humans are marginalized through the legal framing of migration across Europe’s sea borders and airways;

• The legal, cultural, and social contracts that cast citizenship and inclusion in Europe through the lens of race;

• The experience and legacies of slavery and borderization in European empires;

The exploration of uncollected memories of peripheralized voices in Europe, such as the Roma and the Gay Pride movement, through the arts and protest culture.

Werner Sollors

Zahia Rahmani

the National Institute for Art History in Paris. Rahmani delivered her lecture, titled “Building Europe Elsewhere: Restoring the World,” in French and was joined on stage by Alison Rice, professor of French and francophone studies at Notre Dame and Nanovic faculty fellow, who gave a live translation into English. By delivering her lecture on the ways in which European imperialists annexed and indexed “le monde [the world], its objects, its plants, its rocks, and also its people” in French, Rahmani sent a powerful message about the hegemony of the English language in discussions of Europe and in academia in general.

A second keynote lecture was delivered by Werner Sollors, the emeritus Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English at Harvard University, who spoke on the popularity of German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) with Black American authors, poets, singers, and others since the late 19th century. Sollors has found Goethe to be ubiquitous in Black American cultural outputs in this period, such that his research allows for an examination of one of Germany’s most celebrated writers “from without, from the periphery.”

The conference’s final keynote was delivered by Peter Gatrell, professor of migration and economic history at the University of Manchester, and was titled “The Unsettling of Europe – further reflections on migration in/to Europe since 1945.” The lecture drew in part from Gatrell’s book The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent (Basic Books, 2019), which was awarded the 2021 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies by the Nanovic Institute. His research, Gatrell explained, shows how

“hitherto marginal or neglected sites in European history become salient because of migration.”

For the conference organizers, the meeting stimulated new ways of thinking about peripheries and peripheralization in Europe and sparked ideas for future conversations and collaborations. Garibaldi says, “Our visitors were immensely stimulated by the Nanovic Institute’s signature conference and are looking forward to continuing conversations prompted by numerous thematic continuities between panels and keynote lectures.” Commenting on the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, he adds, “Indeed, it has been remarkably generative to put scholars in dialogue with one another who work in a broad range of fields related to European studies.”

Reflecting on the conference, Sedmak offers the following thoughts:

“The imagination is the sense of what is possible and the sense of alternatives to the status quo. The very idea of challenging established ways of imagining Europe through perspectives representing an alternative to ‘textbook views’ of Europe was refreshing and stimulating. The bilingual opening with its performance of redefining the center was powerful. The contested concept of ‘peripheries’ emerged for me as a powerful hermeneutical tool. Looking at Europe through the lens of Roma, Afro-Europeans, and refugees is as powerful as the idea of looking at the reception of European culture.”

Peter Gatrell

The organizers expressed their gratitude to those who made the event possible. “The extraordinary scope and success of this conference,” Garibaldi says, “would have been impossible without Clemens Sedmak’s enthusiasm, and months of expert planning and coordination, facilitated by Rebekah Prince, Melanie Webb, and Grant Osborn.” In turn, the Nanovic Institute is grateful to Garibaldi, Gürel, and Robles for their leadership and vision, to those who made additional intellectual contributions (including Rice, Tetyana Shlikhar, assistant teaching professor of German and Russian languages and literatures, and Chanté Mouton Kinyon, assistant professor of English), and to the keynotes and participants who generously brought their perspectives and insights to bear on a remarkable conversation about the margins and the marginalized in Europe, past and present. ♦

NEWS ROUNDUP

How does Nanovic “Collaborate”?

The Nanovic Institute continues to build an international base of collaborators, through its visiting scholar programs, network of faculty fellows, and the Catholic Universities Partnership. With the additional motivation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the institute is maintaining and expanding these initiatives through collaborations in Europe and support for our colleagues at Ukrainian Catholic University.

- Magdalena

Associate Professor in the Humanities, the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), and Nanovic Institute Affiliated Scholar

“The Nanovic Institute has been providing academic opportunities for scholars from post-Communist Europe and promoting our collaboration, which has turned into long-lasting friendships and ever-growing networks of support.”

Charzyńska-Wójcik

Trauma of Communism

In December 2022, the Catholic Universities Partnership launched The Trauma of Communism, a volume edited by Clemens Sedmak, director of the Nanovic Institute and professor of social ethics, and A. James McAdams, William M. Scholl Professor of International Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, and published by Ukrainian Catholic University Press. Launching the publication, Volodymyr Turchynovskyy, dean of the social sciences faculty and director of the International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues at UCU, described it as “a collection of stories and personal accounts written by scholars from Czechia, Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, and the United States. The volume contributes to an effort of freeing the past from its Soviet and communist embrace which, over the last few decades, has given birth to the ‘Russian world,’ or the Russkiy mir, as its deadly mimicry.”

The Trauma of COMMUNISM

NDI-UCU Collaboration Grants

Over the past year, Notre Dame International (NDI) has awarded nine University of Notre Dame-Ukrainian Catholic University Faculty Collaboration Research grants to deepen the partnership between the two universities and support collaborative research output. The Nanovic Institute has been involved in three successful grant applications:

• “Religion, Religious Diplomacy, and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” led by Fr. Yury Avvakumov (ND) and Oleh Turiy (UCU).

• “State Power against the Faith: Mechanisms of Persecution of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in the Soviet Union and the Forms of Its Resistance and Resilience,” led by Semion Lyandres (ND) and Oleh Turiy (UCU).

• “Strengthening and Understanding Resilient Institutions and Resilient Communities in Ukraine,” led by Clemens Sedmak (ND) and Nataliya Yakymets (UCU).

The majority of this research will take place over the 2023 calendar year. Learn about Notre Dame International's grant offerings in support of the ND-UCU partnership at go.nd.edu/a54a35

Yury Avvakumov Oleh Turiy

Semion Lyandres Nataliya Yakymets

Clemens Sedmak

A. James McAdams

Volodymyr Turchynovskyy

The Catholic University Partnership

Team Irish Award

The staff of the Nanovic Institute was honored with a Team Irish Award, the first of the 2022 football season, on September 10, 2022. This award is conferred on core staff teams at Notre Dame that exemplify its values through a specific project, initiative, or accomplishment.

The Nanovic Institute was selected for swiftly responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by creating content and programming to connect Notre Dame with Ukraine and especially its partner Ukrainian Catholic University. Through this partnership, the Nanovic Institute shared information about the experiences of Ukrainians affected by the war through a myriad of events and panel discussions, organized a summer school for Ukrainian students in partnership with the Catholic University of Croatia, and expanded its visiting scholar program to include more Ukrainian scholars.

These efforts were one more way the institute expressed its mission to “turn hearts and minds to Europe,” especially when it matters most.

Heiskell Award

For its solidarity and partnership with Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) over the past year (and before), the University of Notre Dame received the prestigious 2023 Institute of International Education (IIE) Heiskell Award for Strategic Partnerships.

The criteria for this award selection include building innovative partnerships that foster sustainable international collaboration between universities or with other nonprofit or government agencies. In this case, the award was conferred because of Notre Dame’s continuous support for UCU and its scholars, students, and partners.

The Nanovic Institute played a key role in these activities. As the facilitator of the visiting scholars program, organizer of campus events to build solidarity between U.S. and Ukrainian students, and sponsor of research projects, including “Ukrainian Art as Protest and Resilience” (see page 10), the Nanovic Institute has continued to serve as a leader of the university’s partnership with UCU.

Watch the commemorative video for this award at go.nd.edu/156d9a

Psalms and the Psalters

Beginning in January 2023, the Nanovic Institute facilitated the “Meeting with Psalms and Psalters” lecture series. This virtual, nine-part seminar devoted to the study of the Psalms brings together international scholars from universities and institutes in Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The series is co-chaired by Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik, associate professor at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), and Monika Opalińska, associate professor of the English language at Warsaw University. The series, which will end in December 2023, is sponsored by KUL; the Research Group for the Study of Manuscripts (SIGLUM) and the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw, Poland; and the Nanovic Institute.

View the series at go.nd.edu/c8a247 David playing the harp from BL Royal 2 A XXII, f. 14v, The British Library, United Kingdom, Public Domain.

https://www.europeana.eu/ item/2059209/data_sounds_ E115469d

VISITING SCHOLARS

The Nanovic Institute thanks its 2022-23 visiting scholars for graciously joining us this year and sharing their talents, knowledge, and insights with its faculty fellows, students, and staff. It also looks forward to welcoming more visitors in the 2023-24 academic year. The research and contributions of visiting scholars are an important component of the institute’s intellectual community.

2022-2023 Visiting Scholars

Yaryna Boychuk

UKRAINE - FALL 2022

Chief Executive Officer, Lviv Business School, Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv

Fr. Ante Crnčević

CROATIA- SPRING 2023

Professor, Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Zagreb

Taras Dobko*

UKRAINE - FALL 2022

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Senior Vice-Rector, Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv

Nino Papachashvili

GEORGIA - SUMMER 2023

Professor and Director, Institute for Developmental Studies, SulkhanSaba Orbeliani University, Tbilisi

Andrzej Podraza

POLAND - SPRING 2023

Head of the Department of International Relations and Security, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

Halyna Protsyk

UKRAINE - SPRING 2023

Director of International Academic Relations, Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv

Yaroslav Prytula

UKRAINE - SPRING 2023

Dean of Applied Sciences Faculty, Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv

Dominika Ruszkiewicz

POLAND - SUMMER 2023

Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Culture, Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow

Eugen Zelenak

SLOVAKIA - FALL 2022

Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Catholic University in Ružomberok

*Taras Dobko was named senior vice-rector in 2008 and was recently elected rector of Ukrainian Catholic University, opening a new chapter of collaboration with the Catholic Universities Partnership (CUP) and the Nanovic Institute. His first international meeting was with the CUP, which has fostered international collaboration among institutions of higher learning across Europe for nearly 20 years.

Incoming Visiting Scholars

Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik

POLAND - FALL 2023

Professor, Department of the History of English and Translation Studies, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

Jasna Ćurković Nimac

CROATIA - FALL 2023

Associate Professor, Department of Communication Sciences, Catholic University of Croatia, Zagreb

Zoriana Rybchynska

UKRAINE - FALL 2023

Head of Cultural Studies

Department, Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv

Several visiting scholars gather at Nanovic Hall during the summer of 2023. Pictured left to right: Nino Papachashvili, Dominika Ruszkiewicz, Fr. Ante Crnčević, and Halyna Protsyk.

An Emerging Partnership with the Von Hügel Institute

The Nanovic Institute has formed a new partnership with the Von Hügel Institute at Cambridge University, working with its director Vittorio Montemaggi. Based in St. Edmund’s College (which has a formal partnership with the University of Notre Dame), the Von Hügel Institute is an institute of advanced studies inspired by Catholic thought and culture and focused on contemporary global realities. Motivated by a shared interest in seeing and encountering those at the peripheries, the Nanovic and Von Hügel Institutes collaborated this year on a pilot project with the L’Arche community in Bologna and Rome. An international organization, L’Arche creates networks of community where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together. In October, the institutes co-sponsored— with Notre Dame's Rome Global Gateway serving as co-organizer, sponsor, and host—a tandem bike ride with L’Arche, part of the series Disability, Knowledge and the City where participants cycled the last leg of a Bologna-Rome bicycle pilgrimage following the ancient Via Francigena route. The Rome Global Gateway subsequently hosted a workshop with L'Arche in March 2023.

The Nanovic Institute looks forward to developing this emerging partnership with the Von Hügel Institute and with Montemaggi in his new role as academic director of Notre Dame's London Global Gateway, as well as continued connection with the Rome Global Gateway and the L'Arche community.

was recently named academic director of Notre Dame's London Global

ABOVE: Vittorio Montemaggi, director of the Von Hügel Institute,

Gateway.

RIGHT: Participants in the tandem bike ride with L'Arche in front of the Colosseum in Rome, which is mere blocks away from Notre Dame's Rome Global Gateway.

The Von Hügel Institute/ St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. Photo provided.

n 2017, Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik, then dean of the Faculty of Humanities at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), participated in the inaugural Catholic Leadership Institute and took up her first residency at the Nanovic Institute. Since that time, she has been a dedicated member of the institute’s international community of scholars and friends. Her imaginative, robust, and constant support of the institute’s work led to her appointment as an affiliated scholar during the 2022-23 academic year. Charzyńska-Wójcik says, “Presenting myself as an affiliated scholar of the University of Notre Dame has proved an extremely successful introduction in whatever academic inquiries I have been making, so it is a tremendous boost to my research.”

The past year has been particularly fruitful as Charzyńska-Wójcik has devoted considerable energy to advancing collaboration between Notre Dame and KUL and within the Catholic Universities Partnership (CUP). Beginning in January 2023, alongside her co-convenor Monika Opalińska, associate professor of the English language at Warsaw University, Charzyńska-Wójcik launched a nine-part seminar series Meetings with the Psalms and Psalters. Its success can be measured by its growing audience and plans for publication in the academic journal The Annals of Art. Supported by a grant from the Nanovic Institute, Charzyńska-Wójcik also organized a lecture series by David Gura, Nanovic faculty fellow and curator of ancient and medieval manuscripts at Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library. The series on paleography and codicology with a special focus on medieval English was aimed at addressing the limited access scholars in Poland have at home to specialists in this field. In February 2023, Charzyńska-Wójcik generously shared with Notre Dame Magazine the deeply personal story of her friendship with Svitlana Khyliuk, her colleague from Ukrainian Catholic University. “Between Lviv and Lublin'' (see page 33) focused on how the women’s bond, forged at the Nanovic Institute in 2021,

helped support Khyliuk’s family during the initial harrowing months of the war in Ukraine. Then in April 2023, Charzyńska-Wójcik helped organize a virtual lecture for students and faculty in CUP institutions by John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost at the University of Notre Dame. McGreevy discussed his most recent book Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis (W.W. Norton, 2022).

Building on her relationship with the Nanovic Institute, Charzyńska-Wójcik has drawn many colleagues and students at KUL into a partnership that she describes as “meaningful and empowering.” Since her first term as visiting scholar, she has encouraged her colleagues to follow in her footsteps, a number of whom have subsequently held leadership positions at their home institutions. Charzyńska-Wójcik has helped facilitate collaborative initiatives that directly involve undergraduates from both Notre Dame and KUL. In the summer of 2023, she arranged for students from Notre Dame to undertake eight weeks of service learning in Lublin, working with the College of Humanities at KUL and AGAPE, a Catholic organization that helps people in need. Importantly, these American students will work with their peers from KUL, expanding the CUP’s collaborative reach to include a new generation. For Charzyńska-Wójcik, collaboration with the Nanovic Institute has become indispensable to her work as a scholar and in leadership at a European Catholic university. She looks forward to strengthening the many bonds that stretch between Lublin and South Bend, including her dream of setting up a collaborative Polish program for Notre Dame students who have Polish heritage or an interest in Poland’s culture, history, and language. Of her relationship with the institute, Charzyńska-Wójcik says, “I have felt part of the Nanovic family and this feeling of belonging there has been important to me: it has motivated me to ensure I do everything to prove worthy of the trust I have been shown and inspired to think of the Nanovic as my home institution, for which I want the best.” In fall 2023, Charzyńska-Wójcik will return to her home away from home to take up another short residency at the Nanovic Institute. ♦

“I have felt part of the Nanovic family and this feeling of belonging there has been important to me: it has motivated me to ensure I do everything to prove worthy of the trust I have been shown and inspired to think of the Nanovic as my home institution, for which I want the best.”

Members from the Catholic Universities Partnership, an initiative led by the Nanovic Institute to foster mutual support, elevation, and development of Catholic higher education and civil society in postcommunist and post-Soviet Europe, at an Advanced Leadership Program at Notre Dame's Rome Global Gateway, May 2022. UCU participants mentioned in this publication are standing in the front row from left to right: Sophia Opatska, Halyna Protsyk, and Svitlana Khyliuk.

Crossing the Square

Reflections on Resilience

Launched in 2021, Crossing the Square is a forum to share the voices of scholars and leaders from within the Catholic Universities Partnership and their collaborative research. During the 2022-23 academic year, Crossing the Square has primarily provided a platform for reflections from those university leaders who participated in the Nanovic Institute’s Advanced Leadership Program in May 2022. Convened in Rome, the program blended lectures and lessons with a spiritual retreat, bringing together a select group of academic administrators of Catholic universities in Central and Eastern Europe. With a focus on building resilience into leadership, the program paid particular attention to perspectives and voices from Ukraine and strategies on how CUP members can provide practical support and encouragement to their colleagues at Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU).

After the Advanced Leadership Program, Crossing the Square provided a space to continue participants’ conversations on resilience, leadership, intentionality, and solidarity.

The articles on the platform included writing from colleagues at UCU who shared the various ways in which Russia’s full-scale invasion of their homeland has required them to respond and adapt, testing and stretching their capacity for resilience in university leadership. Sophia Opatska, vice-rector for strategic development at UCU and the founding dean of Lviv Business School provided a deeply personal reflection on the trauma of living under both the constant threat and the reality of aerial bombardment. Opatska reflected on the “Five Cs of Resilience” (developed by Dr. Joel Bennett) — community, compassion, confidence, commitment, and centering — and paid tribute to the UCU faculty, alumni, and students who are on the war’s frontlines, some of whom were not even born when Ukraine restored its independence in 1991. “Their example,” she wrote, “shows that age means nothing if you fight for your family, home, and country, and when you are required to be resilient.”

Halyna Protsyk, director of the International Academic Relations Office and a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at UCU, wrote a reflection on leadership and global solidarity in a time of war. Protsyk, who was also a visiting scholar at the Nanovic Institute during the spring 2023 semester, described her experience leading UCU’s International Office in a time of war and her participation in both the Advanced Leadership Program in Rome and the Catholic Leadership Program at Notre Dame in 2017: “They prepared me to test my own leadership in the context of wartime uncertainty, but also empowered me and my team to activate our strengths even when the situation has seemed to be hopeless.”

The stories in this series touched on topics such as the necessity of relying on others, the value of spiritual retreat, and what can be gained by bringing students and teachers into community. In addition to voices from UCU, the authors included faculty from the Catholic University of Croatia; the Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia; John Paul II Catholic University (KUL) of Lublin, Poland; Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, Hungary; and Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani University in Tbilisi, Georgia.

In her reflection on responsibility in Catholic university leadership, Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik, associate professor and chair of the Department of History of English and Translation Studies at KUL, reflected on the lessons she learned both at the Advanced Leadership Program and during her five years as Dean of the College of Humanities. Emphasizing the importance of intentionality in a leader’s decision-making process, Charzyńska-Wójcik wrote: “The final result, though very important, was not the sole measure of the value of our daily endeavors; whatever happened had an element of good in it because the intention was good.”

Building on a year of robust, inspirational, and intentional conversation between Advanced Leadership Program alumni, the Nanovic Institute looks forward to further developing Crossing the Square as a space for CUP members to collaborate, share, and learn in community. ♦

Between Lviv and Lublin

On the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Nanovic Institute was honored to share the story of two of our former visiting fellows: Svitlana Khyliuk, director of the Ukrainian Catholic University law school, and Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik, associate professor at John Paul II Catholic University in Lublin, who met at the Nanovic Institute in the fall of 2021. Immediately following the Russian invasion, Khyliuk evacuated her children from Lviv in western Ukraine to the safety of her brother’s home in Lublin and then returned to her husband and other responsibilities in a country under siege. During the family’s separation, Charzyńska-Wójcik became an indispensable source of support and solidarity for her Ukrainian friend. What follows is a segment from their story, which may be read in full in Notre Dame Magazine

Driving eastward in Ukraine, toward the air raid sirens that had started the day before, Svitlana Khyliuk made a call to Poland. On the other end, Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik listened as her friend retold the traumatic events of the past 24 hours.

At around 10 a.m. that morning, Khyliuk had walked with her two young children across Ukraine’s western border into Poland. They were fleeing the advancing Russian forces that launched a full-scale invasion of their homeland the previous day, February 24, 2022. An existential threat confronted her family. Khyliuk and her husband, Oleksiy, had to make a heart-wrenching decision.

The family’s journey to Poland was exhausting, terrifying, and traumatic. What would typically be a one-hour drive took 14. They drove as far west as they could before hitting gridlock from the mass movement toward the border. Oleksiy, who would not and could not leave his country when it was under siege, remained with their car, watching his wife, daughter, and son set off on foot into the cold February night.

After a 15-kilometer walk, Khyliuk and the children reached a border crossing and joined a line of countless other women and children, with whom they stood shoulder to shoulder for several hours, unable to use the bathroom or even sit down. Five-year-old Max cried that this forest of taller bodies made him feel like he was “drowning in people,” and begged his mother to make it stop.

When they finally crossed into the relative safety of Polish territory, Khyliuk’s stay was momentary, just long enough to hand her children into the care of her brother, Dmytro, living in Lublin. Her daughter, Larysa, days from her 12th birthday and acutely aware of the danger facing her parents, pointed in confusion at the other women in the crowd, all of whom seemed to be staying with their children, and asked why her mother could not do the same.

Walking back to her husband and war-torn Ukraine, Khyliuk was the only person crossing the border in the opposite direction. On her 15-kilometer walk back to Oleksiy, the adrenaline that had helped her ferry Larysa and Max to safety began to wane. “I realized,” she remembers, “that I was not able to proceed, I was not physically able to keep going.” She flagged down a passing driver who, seeing her exhaustion, brought her the rest of the way.

Driving back to Lviv, Khyliuk called Charzyńska-Wójcik. The children were safe with Khyliuk’s brother in Lublin: could her friend help watch over Larysa and Max during this indefinite, possibly permanent separation? It had been just six months since Khyliuk and Charzyńska-Wójcik first met at Notre Dame. ♦

Commemorating the War in Ukraine

One Year On

In February 2023, the Nanovic Institute collaborated with organizations across campus to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Through these events, the institute expressed its continued solidarity with the people of Ukraine and offered a prayer for peace.

On February 23, the institute collaborated with the Ukrainian Society of Notre Dame and exchange students from Ukrainian Catholic University to host “A One-Year Commemoration of Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine” in the Forum of Nanovic Hall. The gathering drew over 100 attendees who listened to reflections from UCU students, student leaders of the Ukrainian Society of Notre Dame, and Nanovic Institute Director Clemens Sedmak. Two exhibits were placed on display as part of the commemoration: the “Ukrainian Art as Protest and Resilience” exhibition based on undergraduate research facilitated by the Nanovic Institute, and the “Unissued Diplomas” exhibit, which made Notre Dame one of over 45 universities worldwide to mark the date by sharing the stories of Ukrainian students killed in the war. Attendees were also able to view a video in which UCU students at Notre Dame shared their experiences and stories from the early days of the war in February 2022. This video may be viewed on the Nanovic Institute’s YouTube page at go.nd.edu/392990

Following the commemoration, attendees joined a candlelight procession to the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes for a prayer service for peace in Ukraine led by Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. The service was co-sponsored by the Office of the President and Campus Ministry. Fr. Jenkins was joined in prayer by Fr. Yury Avvakumov, associate professor of the history of Christianity in the Department of Theology and Nanovic Institute faculty fellow, Fr. Andrij Hlabse, a theology doctoral candidate and Ukrainian Byzantine Catholic priest, and Fr. Herman Majkrzak, a graduate student in the Department of Theology. UCU exchange student Yana Muliarska brought the petitions and Yevdokiia Yevdokimova read from Isaiah 41, calling upon the Notre Dame community to support the people of Ukraine through prayer.

In his prayer for peace in Ukraine, Fr. Jenkins said:

“Let us at Notre Dame continue to stand in solidarity with all peace-loving people in praying for an end to this unjust war. Let us pray that peace, freedom, and dignity will be enjoyed again by our sisters and brothers in Ukraine, and by all people.”

“A lot of foreigners ask me what they can do for me, for us, for Ukrainians in general, and I really want to ask you to talk. I really encourage you to raise people’s awareness of all those human rights violations and abuses that occur now, and I ask you not to keep silent.”

— Solomiia Humen, law student at the Ukrainian Catholic University and exchange student at Notre Dame Law School, spring 2023

NEWS ROUNDUP

How does Nanovic “Converse”?

The Nanovic Institute continues and deepens its tradition of hospitality and intellectual discourse by fostering a vibrant and inclusive intellectual community constituted by its faculty fellows, graduate student fellows, undergraduate students, and visiting scholars. Through intentional exploration of big questions and the peripheries, the institute is committed to developing a nuanced and diverse understanding of what it means to be European.

“The Nanovic Institute’s greatest strength is the ability to foster a supportive, passionate community of academics who, through collaboration and conversation, are always learning from each other.”

- Will Beattie Doctoral Candidate, the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame

EUROPE IN THE WORLD

Now in its second year, Europe in the World (EITW) is a platform for scholars of Europe to share their analyses and commentary on Europe’s political, social, and economic relations with the rest of the globe. During the 2022-23 academic year, the platform was edited by three Nanovic graduate fellows: medieval studies Ph.D. student Will Beattie and two political science

Ph.D. students, Alec Hahus and Shasta Kaul. EITW published articles on such topics as

• concepts of nation and religion in James Joyce’s Ulysses;

• mercenaries in the medieval Mediterranean and contemporary conflicts around the globe; and

• the transatlantic alliance and the war in Ukraine.

In particular, EITW played a key role in sharing the Decolonizing Scholarship series (see page 46) with a wider audience, publishing interviews with the guest speakers in advance of their visit to Notre Dame and event briefs written by Nanovic graduate fellows following their lectures.

Beyond the Classroom FILM SERIES

In both semesters of the academic year, the Nanovic Institute continued its signature film series, bringing insightful films from Europe to campus and engaging students, faculty, and community partners in conversation.

During the fall semester, the film series New Political Realities in Europe brought participants in contact with central concerns in contemporary European cultures, such as: How to construct a meaningful sense of historical memory (and post-memory);

• How gender and class struggles impact national and, increasingly, transnational identities; and

• How artists can develop new forms of representation to depict those changes.

This film series was curated by Jim Collins, professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre and a Nanovic faculty fellow. A EURO course went along with this film series, which stimulated fascinating discussions between students responding to these films.

Then in the spring, the Nanovic film series theme was Cinema in the Shadow of Empire. These films, curated by Tetyana Shlikhar, assistant teaching professor of Russian and a new Nanovic faculty fellow, explored the unique cinema tradition that developed in Ukraine between the end of the Cold War and today, with a focus on the period after Russia's 2014 invasion and illegal annexation of Crimea and before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Just as in the fall, a course was organized around this theme as well.

Fittingly, the final film in the series Klondike (2022) was shown as part of the “Reimagining Europe from Its Peripheries” conference (see pg. 24). The film follows the story of a couple expecting a child as a plane crash ignites conflict in their community in the Donbas region of Ukraine. The filmmaker, Maryna Er Gorbach, joined participants virtually for remarks after its conclusion. Olivier Morel, associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, described this event as “one of the most impressive conversations with a filmmaker I have experienced.”

Will Beattie Alec Hahus Shasta Kaul

New Faculty Fellows

Laura Banella Assistant Professor of Italian, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

Chanté Mouton Kinyon Assistant Professor, Department of English

Arman Schwartz Assistant Professor, Program of Liberal Studies

Jeremy Phillip Brown Jordan H. Kapson Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies

Department of Theology

Heather Hyde Minor Professor of 16th18th Century Europe, Department of Art, Art History, and Design

Siiri Scott Head of Acting and Directing, and Professor of the Practice, Department of Film, Television, and Theatre

Ann-Marie Conrado Cregg Family Director of the Program in Collaborative Innovation and Associate Professor of Industrial Design, Department of Art, Art History, and Design

Ana Leticia Fauri Assistant Teaching Professor of Portuguese, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

Claire Reising Assistant Teaching Professor and Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in French and Francophone Studies, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

Tetyana Shlikhar

Assistant Teaching Professor of Russian, and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Russian, Department of German and Russian Languages and Literature

Aldo Tagliabue Assistant Professor, Department of Classics

Erika Hosselkus Curator of Latin American, Iberian, and Latinx Collections, Strategic Planning Implementation Project Manager and Special Collection Curator, Rare Books and Special Collections, Hesburgh Libraries

Anne Schaefer Associate Teaching Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

Heather Wiebe Teaching Professor, Program of Liberal Studies

30th Anniversary Celebration

2022 marked 30 years since the Nanovic Institute’s founding in 1992. To mark this occasion, we held a celebration in the Nanovic Hall Forum on November 4, 2022. We were delighted to have our founding benefactor Robert Nanovic in attendance as we shared the impact of the Institute on Notre Dame, its community, and the lives of its students over these past three decades. Several members of the institute's advisory board were also in attendance and the short program included toasts by the board's chair Jane Heiden and members Stephen Barrett '75 and Terrence R. Keeley '81. We also welcomed Dr. Joyce Wegs and her daughter Alison Wegs Abner, who represented the late J. Robert Wegs, Nanovic’s founding director.

To highlight the Institute’s growing role in connecting Notre Dame with Ukraine, students from Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) performed a traditional Ukrainian song, “Mnohaya Lita” (“Многая Літа,” “Many Years” in English) with Fr. Yury P. Avvakumov (see more on pg. 13) and Taras Dobko, visiting scholar at the Nanovic Institute who was elected rector at UCU in June 2023.

Representatives from the Ukrainian Society of Notre Dame and Ukrainian Catholic University, including Taras Dobko, who was appointed UCU rector in June 2023, singing traditional Ukrainian songs at the 30th anniversary celebration.

Robert Nanovic, founding benefactor of the Nanovic Institute, and Jane Heiden, chair of the Nanovic Institute’s advisory board.

Robert Nanovic in conversation with Dr. Joyce Wegs (center) and her daughter Alison Wegs Abner (left), family of the late J. Robert Wegs, Nanovic's founding director.

Graduate Student Collaboration at the Notre Dame-Bielefeld Transatlantic Workshop

For doctoral students in the Notre Dame Department of History, the close of the academic year has been marked by an opportunity for conversation and community with peers from the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Since 2010, the University of Notre Dame/ University of Bielefeld Transatlantic Workshop has met annually, alternating in location between South Bend and Bielefeld in northeastern Germany. The workshop is sponsored by the Nanovic Institute with additional support from the Notre Dame Department of History.

In May 2022, the workshop was in Bielefeld and, due to COVID-19, was the first meeting to take place in person in three years. The presentation topics at the 2022 workshop ranged from modern Bangladesh to the North American West and from fifteenth-century Italy to nineteenth-century Haiti. It was coordinated by Alexander Martin, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and Nanovic Institute faculty fellow, and Bettina Brandt, professor of history at the University of Bielefeld.

Notre Dame historians took their turn hosting their Transatlantic colleagues in May 2023. In addition to the visitors, the workshop involved nine Notre Dame graduate presenters and commentators and a number of history department faculty. As Martin explains, “the purpose of the workshop is to encourage discussion

around a broad range of historical fields and to familiarize students from the U.S. and Germany with each other’s academic culture.” In addition to formal academic sessions, the 2023 program included Notre Dame campus tours, dinners on and off campus, and field trips to Chicago and Lake Michigan. “This aspect of the workshop,” Martin says, “is the reason why it has to be in-person, and we are grateful, as in past years, for the Nanovic Institute’s generous support.”

Maybe Cannons Will Rumble

Ian Kuijt, professor of anthropology and Nanovic faculty fellow, and William Donaruma, professor of the practice in filmmaking and creative director for the office of digital learning, traveled within Ukraine for nine days in March 2023 to document and assess damage to heritage buildings and archaeology sites that has occurred since the beginning of the Russian invasion. Through interviews and on-site footage, their film project Maybe Cannons Will Rumble explores these findings, including notable examples of the construction of military fortifications and trenches in medieval villages and graveyards and attacks on Ukrainian cultural landmarks.

You may watch a behind-the-scenes preview of this project on their Vimeo channel at vimeo.com/817748843

William Donaruma Ian Kuijt

Will Beattie, a doctoral candidate in Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute, describes the Nanovic Institute as “a vibrant center of intellectual collaboration and communication.”

As a member of the graduate fellows program in 2022-23, Beattie fully embraced and emulated that collaborative spirit. As an entry point to the Nanovic community, he says that the opportunity to meet with other graduate fellows regularly to share work and discuss their experiences of academic professionalization, “encapsulates what I believe the Nanovic Institute’s greatest strength is: the ability to foster a supportive, passionate community of academics who are always learning from each other.”

As an instructor of record for two European studies undergraduate classes, he had the opportunity to support the institute’s goal of fostering undergraduate education and to hone his skills as a faculty member in training. Beattie’s research is in eschatological literature — writings that relate to death and the fate of the soul and humankind — during the medieval period, particularly in Anglo-Saxon England. Building on his expertise, he taught two EURO classes: Apocalypse Now? The End in English Literary

Culture (fall 2022) and Revealing Doomsday: The History of Apocalypse in the West (spring 2023). Of this experience, Beattie says, “I learned a great deal about how to plan and teach effectively from these classes and received insightful feedback that I am sure will help me in the future.”

Beattie has also found he shares a common belief with the institute in the value of public-facing education and taking academic research out into the world. As a co-editor of Europe in the World (EITW) during 2022-23, he was part of a team that supported graduate colleagues and others in writing for non-specialist audiences. “Working closely with so many talented people at Nanovic,” he reflects “has, I hope, made me a stronger and clearer writer in turn.” Beattie is also proud of the work that EITW has done to support the Decolonizing Scholarship series, helping to generate interest in these important discussions about the methods and imperatives behind expansive and inclusive research in the 21st century. In work that has been indispensable to pursuing the institute’s research priorities, the EITW team has provided a way for broad audiences to engage with these discussions led by leaders in their fields.

“As a graduate student,” Beattie says, “my own research and professional development have benefited enormously from the opportunities that the institute provides.” ♦

“As a graduate student, my own research and professional development have benefited enormously from the opportunities that the institute provides.”

The Three Languages of Mother

The power of words and the power of truth were the foci of an April 19 panel discussion on the poem

“

мама” (“Mother”) from the chapbook Деякі вірші (Some Poems) by the Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk This event, co-sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs, brought together panelists whose personal and scholarly interpretations of this work of written art — originally in Ukrainian and then translated into English and Irish — offered an opportunity to reflect on the human stories of the war in Ukraine.

Nanovic Institute Director Clemens Sedmak, professor of social ethics at the Keough School, introduced the panel and explained that it was part of the institute’s broader commitment to keeping attention on the war in Ukraine. Ensuring the visibility of Ukrainian people on campus, including visiting scholars and students from Ukrainian Catholic University, is perhaps the most important element of this work. The discussion of “мама,” Sedmak explained, recognized “the special power that only voices from Ukraine can bring, a special power in words.”

Siobhán O’Grady, chief Ukraine correspondent with the Washington Post who met Kruk at an event in Kyiv, shared the experiences and memories that stood out to her from her time in Ukraine. O’Grady found herself particularly moved by human stories and, especially, family stories. These encounters are part of the reason she was so drawn to the poem “мама.” Kruk’s poem evokes the reflections and despair of a mother whose son is at war as she pleads with Death to recognize her child’s innocence. She prays:

I beg you; oh God, don’t place him at the front, please don’t rain rockets down on him, oh God, O’Grady recalled one such family story — that of 31-year-old Maksym Omelianenko and his mother Lyudmila — in which the soldier received news that his mother, who he assumed was safe at home, suffered terrible injuries from a deadly Russian cruise missile attack on her apartment building in Dnipro. Maksym was able to visit his mother briefly before departing again for the frontline. “Of course, she’s very worried for me,” he told O’Grady, “but she understands that we’re doing it for all of Ukraine.”

In their analysis of “мама,” Brian Ó Conchubhair, associate professor of Irish language and literature and Nanovic Institute faculty fellow, and Thomas O’Grady, poet, literature professor, and scholar-inresidence at Saint Mary’s College, also reflected on how

poetry gives expression to the human face of war. Ó Conchubhair, for example, considered the voice and perspective emphasized in “мама,” and he suggested that the poem resonated with an Irish audience because it conveys a universal human experience. It could be read, he said, as “a poem of rawness, emotion, out of time and out of place.”

Halyna Protsyk, director of international academic relations at Ukrainian Catholic University, took the fourth seat on the panel and gave voice to a Ukrainian reading. In her reflections on “мама,” she drew the audience’s attention to the human stories in a war that has become ubiquitous in Ukrainian daily life. She noted that the poem was written after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 but before the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Given how the Russian invasion has expanded, Protsyk and Kruk agree that the last two lines no longer represent Ukrainians’ experience of war:

I don’t even know what a rocket looks like, my son, I can’t picture the war even to myself.

“War is now ubiquitous,” Protsyk explained. “It is behind every shoulder, affecting every family, and concerns everyone.” While poets writing between 2014-2021 could afford to be reflective, the work produced after the full-scale invasion is more direct, dispensing with artistic play, allusions, and metaphors. Kruk describes the new form as “a poetry of emotional fact, a poetry of immediate reaction.” Ukrainian war poems, Protsyk said, are testimonies that allow individuals to retain and preserve their humanity, “a deep process that brings us back to the meaning of the written word.”

As Protsyk reflected, the Ukrainian mother evoked in “мама,” whose knowledge of war is indirect, has been replaced by new images of the Ukrainian mother in war. These include “a refugee mother having fled home with her 2.5 million children in tow … an orphan mother who had her 16,000 children kidnapped and transported illegally to Russia with no further information about their destiny,” mothers who have been murdered and raped, mothers now responsible for healing their children’s psychological scars, supporting their veteran children, or fighting on the front lines themselves. Or, a mother like Lyudmila in Dnipro, who knows exactly what the rockets that rain down on her son Maksym look like and who prays for the day when she can tell him, to quote Protsyk: “Shhh, it’s all over. We survived … We remained human. We remained Ukrainians.” ♦

Visiting scholars from UCU Halyna Protsyk, director of international academic relations, and Yaroslav Prytula, dean of applied sciences faculty, pose with Siobhán O'Grady and exchange students from UCU.

A Ukrainian War Poem in Translation

Laura Shannon Prize Residency at Kylemore Abbey

Storytelling in Scholarship

In August 2022, the Nanovic Institute facilitated a week-long Laura Shannon Prize Residency at the University of Notre Dame’s Kylemore Abbey Global Center in County Galway, Ireland. The Abbey is home to a Benedictine Community, part of one of the world’s oldest monastic traditions, that was founded in 1920 by nuns who fled Belgium during World War I. Since 2016, Notre Dame has partnered with the Benedictine Community to further their shared missions and to establish a center within this remarkable 19th-century estate in the heart of Connemara, an area of striking natural beauty.

The Laura Shannon Prize Residency is a collaborative writing retreat that marks a new phase in the life of the Prize, which has been awarded annually to the best book in contemporary European studies since 2010. The Residency brought three previous prize-winning authors into conversation with seven University of Notre Dame graduate students, along with Notre Dame faculty and staff, to discuss scholarship and writing with a particular focus on the art of storytelling.

The Laura Shannon Prize Residency was envisioned to enhance the Prize by creating a community between its winners and Notre Dame graduate students and faculty. While prize winners already undertake a campus visit that includes both a public lecture and informal meetings, the residency facilitated sustained conversations and connections, both scholarly and personal. To begin the week, an itinerary of cultural excursions — including a Famine Walk led by local archeologist Michael Gibbons — facilitated community building and inspired reflections on history, heritage, and storytelling. This was followed by workshops and writing sessions at the Kylemore Global Center that brought graduate students, faculty, and prize winners into close conversation and reflection on their scholarship and writing as an art. Throughout the residency, participants were graciously welcomed by the hosting Benedictine nuns, some of whom shared a meal or took part in a residency discussion, to reflect and pray during Mass and vespers in their chapel. These moments of invitation into communal and personal contemplation with the sisters gave the scholars an opportunity to reflect deeply on the value and meaning of their research and writing.

Reflecting the Laura Shannon Prize’s cross-disciplinary reach, the residency incorporated expertise and insights from across the humanities and social sciences. The graduate student participants worked within the fields of biblical studies, English, history, peace studies, and political science. Reflecting on the residency, participants noted the uniqueness of a writing retreat that comprised both opportunities for structured and unstructured conversation between graduate students, faculty, and esteemed prize-winning authors, and for personal reflection and introspection within the tranquility of Kylemore Abbey. Carlos

A. Garcia Alayon, a doctoral candidate in theology, said that the most formative experiences of the week were his unscheduled conversations with the individual authors during walks or over dinner. He welcomed the “unscripted, informal time to really share ideas; it really stretched my thinking and imagination.”

The invitees also praised the residency — its location, structure, and thematic focus — as a maturation of a book prize that is unique and filled with potential.

Eleonory Gilburd noted the spiritual setting of the Abbey, which “allows you to think about the ethical implications of your writing,” and provides “a beautiful combination of the physical and the spiritual, the intellectual and the aesthetic.”

Max Bergholz said that while the transformation of a prize in ways that “harness together the strength, skills, and experience of the winners into a force for mentorship” seems like a natural next step, it is something he has never seen before. The Nanovic Institute looks forward to building upon the experience of this first Laura Shannon Prize Residency and continuing to grow this community of students, faculty, and prize winners. ♦

The trio of former prize winners comprised authors from both the humanities and the history and social sciences cycles:

• Max Bergholz, associate professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal and winner of the 2019 prize for his book Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell University Press, 2016); Eleonory Gilburd, associate professor of history and the college at the University of Chicago and winner of the 2020 prize for To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018); and

• Mark Thompson, associate professor of history at the University of East Anglia and winner of the 2016 prize for Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kiš (Cornell University Press, 2013).

Learn more about this event and hear from participants in both a recap and a panel discussion at go.nd.edu/2f37d3.

Decolonizing Scholarship. . . . is inspired by the institute’s strategic emphasis on “peripheries,” de-centering the center, and listening to voices that are typically omitted from or misrepresented in dominant understandings of our past and present.

ABOVE: Students talk with Lewis R. Gordon from the University of Connecticut, and Abigail Lewis, postdoctoral research associate at the Nanovic Institute.

RIGHT: Marisol LeBrón from the University of California, Santa Cruz, presents her lecture in April 2023.

Decolonizing Scholarship

In December 2022, the Nanovic Institute launched a new speaker series titled Decolonizing Scholarship. The series is inspired by the institute’s strategic emphasis on “peripheries,” de-centering the center, and listening to voices that are typically omitted from or misrepresented in dominant understandings of our past and present. The Nanovic Institute is committed to fostering research and teaching that presents European studies in a new light. The institute worked closely with Nanovic faculty fellows to develop the parameters and vision for the series and to identify innovative and highly respected scholars who could bring their insights and expertise into the Nanovic community’s conversation about the complex legacies of European colonialism, particularly within scholarship itself.

This series has brought scholars to Notre Dame who are at the top of their fields in various academic disciplines, including ethnic studies, French and francophone studies, history, philosophy, and theology. During their visits, the scholars conversed with students and faculty over coffee and dinner and delivered lunchtime lectures that provided context and concrete examples of the project of decolonization within their particular discipline.

The Nanovic Institute is committed to fostering a wide and inclusive conversation circle around Decolonizing Scholarship. To this end, the graduate student editors of Europe in the World (EITW) worked with Nanovic staff to develop a series of publications that allowed for deeper engagement with each scholar’s work both before and after their campus visits. EITW worked with each visiting speaker to publish their answers to several interview questions in advance of their visit, which provided insight into how that scholar approaches the project of decolonization within their own work. Following the campus visits, EITW published a series of event briefs on each lecture, written by graduate fellows. Along with video recordings that are available on the Nanovic Institute’s YouTube page, these briefs provide a wide audience with an opportunity to catch up on or revisit each lecture.

The Decolonizing Scholarship series opened with Lewis R. Gordon, professor and department head of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, who gave a lunchtime lecture titled “Decolonizing Philosophy, Decolonizing Theory,” on February 3. Gordon’s lecture emphasized that recognizing others is critical to clarity in communication, and this includes listening to and communicating with the past, generating a conversation between ancestors and descendants that explores how we all understand, accept, and challenge received wisdom. For Gordon, as graduate fellow Shasta Kaul writes, recognizing others involves unmooring ourselves from a fixed point in time to pursue shared human truths, allowing individuals to “create genuine connections with people and things other than themselves, and with times, past and future, other than their own.”

Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez, Dominican priest and professor of theology at Boston College, provided the series’ second lecture titled “Bodies, Territories, and Knowledges in Resistance” on February 24. In considering the prospect of decolonizing theology, Fr. Mendoza-Álvarez first considered whether it is possible to decolonize Christianity and noted that his approach to this challenge has been guided by the decolonial turn ushered in by the Second Vatican Council and by Pope Francis’s exhortation to listen carefully to the social and geographical peripheries. In the course of his lecture, Fr. Mendoza-Álvarez explained that, as graduate

fellow Francisco J. Cintrón Mattei wrote, “Decolonizing theological scholarship is a process of dismantling the…structures of a hegemonic Christianity tied to the colonial epic that began in the late 15th century,” combined with “dismantling global systemic violence and recovering knowledge that has been destroyed or made invisible.”

On March 31, Laurent Dubois, the John L. Nau III Bicentennial Professor in the History & Principles of Democracy and director for academic affairs of the Democracy Initiative at the University of Virginia, was the third visiting lecturer in the series. Dubois explored the task of decolonizing scholarship in French and francophone studies by taking three snapshots from France’s colonial and postcolonial history: a staged island of “Brazilians” during the visit of King Henry II to the city of Rouen, France, in 1550; the 18th century Haitian Revolution; and the 1998 World Cup tournament, which provided an entry point for discussing France’s uniquely long history of having non-white players on its national soccer team. Dubois’ lecture, Nanovic graduate fellow Will Beattie wrote, showed that to decolonize scholarship “we must … accept that the rest of the world has shaped Europe just as much as Europe has shaped the rest of the world.”

The spring 2023 portion of the Decolonizing Scholarship series closed with a lecture by Marisol LeBrón, who is an associate professor in feminist studies and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Titled “Debt and Decolonial Feminist Resistance in Puerto Rico,” LeBrón’s lecture focused on how Puerto Rican residents responded to the U.S. federal government’s imposition of a Fiscal Control Board in 2016, a financial encumbrance that proved particularly burdensome in the wake of the destruction wrought by hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. LeBrón’s scholarship includes collaborative curation of educational resources, such as the Puerto Rico Syllabus which demonstrates that, as Nanovic graduate fellow Lora Jury wrote, “there is power and empowerment in the demystification of financial language and international economic policy.”

The Decolonizing Scholarship series will continue in fall 2023 with lectures by Lydie Moudileno, the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and professor of French and American studies and ethnicity and comparative literature at the University of Southern California, Nitzan Shoshan, assistant professor at the Center for Sociological Studies at the Colegio de México in Mexico City, and Rufus Burnett Jr., assistant professor of theology at Fordham University. ♦

THE JOURNEY OF THE EXTRA MILE Encounters and Experiences with Peripheries

While I was driving through a snowstorm near Važec in the Žilina Region of northern Slovakia in March 2023, I thought about the Nanovic Institute’s decision to emphasize “peripheries.” Our strategic plan says: “The scholarship and works of Nanovic community members seek to encompass the lived experiences of all people in Europe, including those marginalized by geography, poverty, policies of citizenship, and difference.” We want to honor Pope Francis’ invitation to go out to “the peripheries,” as he writes in Evangelii Gaudium 20.

The village of Važec with its 2,400 inhabitants represents a peripheral place in some sense, but it also has a significant number of marginalized people— Roma families who live in a special area of the town. There is ample evidence of the social exclusion challenges faced by the Roma population in many European countries.

William Smith, a Notre Dame student of theology and philosophy, expressed an interest in our Serving (in) Europe program, where the Nanovic Institute facilitates service learning opportunities through eight-week internships “at the peripheries.” He chose to serve with an organization in Važec, supporting the Roma families in town. He knew he would have to be a pioneer, and he lived up to the challenge. A colleague from the Catholic University of Ružomberok, not too far away from Važec, connected with William and sent me a message: “William is doing an excellent job with the Roma kids —when I think of it I feel humbled that it takes an American student to volunteer over his holiday to help…we need to do more to help our Roma population. I just wanted to say that we are so grateful for the fact that the Nanovic [Institute] started this activity.”

I am not writing this to sing our praises but to illustrate the reality of a commitment to the “peripheries”: exploring the roads less traveled, embracing remote spaces, and seeking to establish a human connection with persons affected by social exclusion and marginalization. It is a humbling learning experience to follow Pope Francis’ call to leave our comfort zones.

The Nanovic Institute is particularly committed to exploring the place of “peripheries” in European studies and the experience of Europe. This commitment also involves the idea, beautifully expressed by British development expert Robert Chambers, of “putting the last first,” of “decentering the center.” Of course, we are not in a position to judge who is “first” and who is “last,” and, of course, the label “peripheries” has its own challenges, but we do want to be intentional about walking the extra mile beyond the centers of power and attention. The Roma families in Važec may be marginalized, but they have clearly become central to William’s perspective on Europe.

Like him, we want to widen our imagination and the horizon of European studies through encounters, research, invitations, and collaborations.

– Clemens Sedmak

STAFF

Clemens Sedmak

Director and Professor of Social Ethics

Peter Boyle

Finance and Administration Coordinator

Anna Dolezal

Student Programs Assistant Director

Jennifer Lechtanski

Graphic Designer

Abigail Lewis

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Gráinne McEvoy

Writer and Editorial Program Manager

Hildegund Müller

Senior Liaison for Research and Curricular Affairs and Associate Professor of Classics

Grant Osborn

Senior Associate Director

Morgan Munsen

Research and Partnerships Program Manager

Rebecca Prince

Events Coordinator

Keith Sayer

Communications Program Director

Melanie Webb

Associate Director

STUDENT ASSISTANTS

Pedro Bolsonaro ’25

Gabe Gelke ’23

Aaron Jalca ’23

Ana Peczuh ’23

FACULTY COMMITTEE 2022-23

Yury Avvakumov

Theology

Tobias Boes

German and Russian Languages and Literatures

Meredith Chesson

Anthropology

Olivier Morel

Film, Television, and Theatre

Alison Rice

Romance Languages and Literatures

Ingrid Rowland

Architecture

ADVISORY BOARD

Robert and Elizabeth Nanovic

Founding Benefactors

Jane Heiden

Chair

Dominica Annese

R. Stephen Barrett

Paul Black

David Buckley

Terrence R. Keeley

Claire Shannon Kelly

Paul L. Mahoney

Susan Mahoney Hatfield

Patrick Moran

Susan Nanovic Flannery

Sean M. Reilly

Katie Shannon

Peter Šťastný

Michael E. Taten

Clare Welch

2022-23 Alumni Representative