From the Interim Director French philosopher Simone Weil had adopted the motifs of “waiting” and “attention” as key pillars of her philosophy; approaching another person, indeed approaching the world and also approaching God requires respectful waiting at a threshold. This moment of “threshold” had been described as “liminality,” or an “in-between state” by Victor Turner, a British cultural anthropologist. A few decades later, the Austrian cultural sociologist Justin Stagl published an important study on the history of curiosity and the history of traveling, “Eine Geschichte der Neugier.” “Threshold” and “liminality,” “curiosity” and “traveling” are helpful concepts in describing this last year at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. Please see for yourselves in the following pages! We have, as always, sought to support and nourish the curiosity of students and faculty exploring Europe through research questions, embarking on travels in the mind and travels to Europe; we supported undergraduate students in their research pursuits, faculty-led immersion experiences in Europe, and European visitors coming to work with us. And then, in the middle of spring break, there was a disruption; we had to make sure that all our students could return safely to the United States. We had to make sure that our two visiting scholars reached their home countries (Slovakia and Italy). We have had to deal with the effects of the pandemic ever since, moving to remote work, online meetings and events like a live-streamed lecture on the ethics of remembering and a virtual conference of our Catholic Universities Partnership. There is still curiosity (even more so, given the unprecedented circumstances we find ourselves in), there are still travels in the mind—but physical traveling has been reduced significantly. We are on a threshold and in a situation of liminality. The art and challenge of living in liminality is the invitation to grow in the middle of a transitory stage. The biblical book of Jeremiah contains a “Letter to the People in Exile” in chapter 29, in which Jeremiah conveys God’s command to the exiled: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce” ( Jeremiah 29:5). This is an invitation to be active in spite of the uncertainty and the transition. It means “living well on a threshold.” This is what we have been trying to do. This past academic year saw a change of leadership at the Institute and my current position as interim director is liminal in itself. I am grateful to my predecessors Bill Donahue and Jim McAdams for having built a strong Institute, I am grateful for the generous support of our Advisory Board, and I am grateful to my colleagues at the Nanovic Institute and our faculty fellows who make life on the threshold an experience of growth and joy. The amazing wealth of European traditions will not come to an end, nor will Europe’s sources of hope. There will also be many new things to explore as we try to understand “Europe after 2020.” Thank you for your connectedness with Europe and the Nanovic Institute.
“We have, as always, sought to support and nourish the curiosity of students and faculty exploring Europe through research questions, embarking on travels in the mind and travels to Europe.”
Clemens Sedmak Interim Director and Professor of Social Ethics Nanovic Institute for European Studies Keough School of Global Affairs
INSTITUTE TEAM Jennifer Arosio Events Coordinator Connor Bran Communications and Publications Coordinator Monica Caro Senior Associate Director Anna Dolezal Student Programs Assistant Manager Mark T. Kettler Postdoctoral Research Associate Jennifer Lechtanski Graphic Designer Grant Osborn Assistant Director Heather Stanfiel Postdoctoral Research Associate Melanie Webb Operations Assistant Director
Table of Contents FACULTY COMMITTEE Maurizio Albahari Associate Professor Department of Anthropology and Keough School of Global Affairs Tobias Boes Associate Professor Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures Theodore Cachey Professor of Italian and the Albert J. and Helen M. Ravarino Family Director of Dante and Italian Studies Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Ian Kuijt Professor Department of Anthropology Susannah Monta John Cardinal O'Hara, C.S.C., and Glynn Family Honors Associate Professor Department of English Hildegund Müller (Spring) Associate Professor Department of Classics Clemens Sedmak (Fall) Professor Center for Social Concerns and Keough School of Global Affairs ADVISORY BOARD Robert Nanovic, Founding Benefactor Elizabeth Nanovic, Founding Benefactor Jane Heiden, Chair Dominica Annese
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EDUCATION IN ACTION
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GRADUATE RESEARCH 7 A FACULTY PERSPECTIVE
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Connect EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES
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HISTORIES OF VIOLENCE
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PEOPLE AND PARTNERSHIPS
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2019-2020 EVENT HIGHLIGHTS
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A NEW VIRTUAL REALITY
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Transform UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
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GRADUATE STUDENTS
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EUROPE 2020 40
R. Stephen Barrett, Jr. Susan Nanovic Flannery Susan Mahoney Hatfield Terrence R. Keeley Paul L. Mahoney Patrick Moran Sean M. Reilly Laura Shannon Peter Šťastný
On the cover Elsa Barron '21 looks over ruins while in Athens, Greece on a Nanovic Travel and Research Grant. Read more about her journey on page 32. Photos and graphics Giuseppe Milo via Flickr. University of Notre Dame: College of Arts and Letters; Keough School of Global Affairs, Main Campus and Washington Office; Marketing and Communications with special thanks to Matt Cashore and Barbara Johnston; Nanovic Institute for European Studies with special thanks to Connor Bran, Jennifer Lechtanski, Melanie Webb, and Notre Dame faculty and students.
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“This experience marked the culmination of my thesis fieldwork at a critical juncture in the sociopolitics of Italy.” Abigail Campbell ’20 Political Science and Economics Travel and Research Grant to Rome, Italy 2
Year in Review 2019-20
Student Programming UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH The Nanovic Institute for European Studies continued to fulfill its mission of outstanding student support through numerous grant offerings, most notably travel and research grants. This year, despite the disruption of coronavirus to summer programs, 25 undergraduates received travel and research grants and traveled to 16 different countries. The Institute supported innovative, timely projects addressing key issues that Europe and the world face today, including junior peace studies major Conal Fagan’s investigation into the provisions provided by international humanitarian and civil society organizations for disabled refugees, who comprise some of Europe’s most vulnerable, and junior environmental engineering student Kaitlyn Calhoun’s research into microplastics in the Aegean Sea and their impact on the local ecosystem and food chain. Lyla Senn, a first-year chemical engineering major, traveled to the Maltese countryside to study water recycling and sustainable farming. Brady Stiller, valedictorian of the class of 2020 and double major in theology and biology, used his Nanovic grant to examine the works of G.K. Chesterton at the London Global Gateway, a collection he helped the University acquire, ultimately adding valuable insights to his senior thesis.
2019-2020 ACADEMIC YEAR
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UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT GRANTS
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GRADUATE STUDENT GRANTS
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14 Departments
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16 COUNTRIES Students pictured (counterclockwise): Conal Fagan '21, Switzerland; Kaitlyn Calhoun '21, Greece; Lyla Senn '23, Malta; Brady Stiller '20, United Kingdom.
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Clockwise: Nanovic Postdoctoral Research Associate Heather Stanfiel with the Transnational European Studies DC Seminar cohort at the Belgian Embassy. Gabriel Niforatos ’21 introduces a fellow student of the Transnational European Studies Seminar. Notre Dame students listen to Amanda Sloat (right), Robert Bosch senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, speak at the Nanovic Washington Policy Forum. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney speaks at the reception.
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Education in Action NEW COURSES AND RESOURCES With an expanded curriculum, featuring nine new, innovative EURO courses, and novel student program initiatives, the Nanovic Institute continued to develop advanced learning opportunities in 2019-2020 and play an integral role in fostering students’ passions for all things Europe. One new undergraduate seminar, “European Studies Today,” integrated the Institute’s fall events into the course, bringing students into critical conversation with scholars of Europe and demonstrating how academics marshal evidence and analysis to grapple with new questions. The Institute also launched Notre Dame’s first undergraduate survey course on modern German history since the spring of 2013, which asked students to confront, analyze, and dispel myths about German history that can inhibit analysis of contemporary issues. Mark T. Kettler, Ph.D., a Nanovic postdoctoral research associate, developed these courses to train students to analyze and synthesize primary sources to bolster their critical reading of historical scholarship. Outside of the classroom, Kettler helped co-organize the Nanovic Institute’s first annual Eurocup Trivia Competition. By encouraging dorms to compete with one another, this undergraduate outreach event built significantly on the Institute’s previous trivia night; undergraduate participation in this fun night of European-themed trivia increased sixfold.
SEMINAR IN WASHINGTON, DC Students from across the University also had a chance to participate in the multi-disciplinary “Transnational European Studies Seminar,” focused on a selection of the most pressing challenges facing the EuropeanAmerican relationship today. The course, which was co-taught and developed by Heather Stanfiel, Ph.D., a Nanovic postdoctoral research associate, and William Collins Donahue, Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Professor of the Humanities and former director of the Nanovic Institute, included 14 undergraduate students from such diverse majors as political science, mathematics, finance, philosophy, and international economics, as well as eight graduate students in the Keough School’s Master of Global Affairs program.
More than 60 undergraduates—in teams of three to five students—participated in a trivia competition for Notre Dame’s first ever Eurocup. This year, Lewis Hall (above) took home the trophy!
The course involved an immersive learning component during fall break in which students and instructors traveled to the nation’s capital and participated in dynamic sessions with experts in European politics from the Brookings Institution, the German Marshall Fund, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Belgian Embassy, among others. A special highlight for students was the chance to interact with then-acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney following the signature event of the week, the inaugural Nanovic Washington Policy Forum, “Brexit, Brinkmanship, and the Future of Ireland: The Role of the U.S. in Safeguarding the Northern Ireland Peace Process,” cohosted with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. Daniel Mulhall, ambassador of Ireland to the United States, and Andrew McCormick, Northern Ireland civil service director general for international relations, provided the Irish perspective on Brexit for the forum panel. U.S. policy perspectives were offered from New York Congressman Peter King, co-chair of the Friends of Ireland Caucus; Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, member of the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee; and Amanda Sloat, a Robert Bosch senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. Thomas Wright, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, served as the forum moderator. The Nanovic Institute for European Studies
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MIGRATION SEMINAR IN GERMANY As part of the spring semester curriculum, the Institute offered another immersive seminar, “Europe Responds to the Migration Crisis: The Case of Germany.” The course provided an opportunity for students to explore various aspects of Germany’s current policies toward refugees and immigrants and included a one-week trip to Berlin prior to the start of the semester. The course brought students directly into dialogue with federal, state, and local government officials, civil society groups, and representatives of international organizations to explore Germany’s policies toward asylum-seekers, the relationship between these policies and the European Union, policies to integrate refugees and migrants into German society, and the political impact of these policies. Culminating in a poster exhibit to showcase their findings, the seminar allowed the class to assess the efficacy of current policies and identify best policy practices going forward.
“The Migration Seminar has been my favorite class so far. It has truly allowed me to delve deep into a topic that the Nanovic Institute has helped me to discern that I have interest in.” Maureen Kenny ’22 Political Science and Global Affairs Participant in EURO Course Curriculum, 2019-2020
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GRADUATE RESEARCH
Above left: Students participating in the “Europe Responds to the Migration Crisis: The Case of Germany” seminar meet with officials from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration.
Above center: Students in the migration seminar delight in the opportunity to immerse themselves in German culture. This photo captures the students waiting to begin a German culinary course.
Above right: Photo by Kristina Nagalina '20, a graduate student in the School of Architecture. She traveled to Norway and Sweden to conduct research on the architecture of Scandinavian port cities.
The work of graduate students continued to elevate the interdisciplinary research profile of the Institute. This year, the Nanovic Institute supported 18 graduate students with travel and research grants, taking them to 10 different countries, where they explored topics such as the complex nature of identity in Europe today. MFA student Nazli Koca ’20 pursued research for her novel about a young Turkish girl who spends several years in Berlin attempting to integrate, while maintaining her Turkish roots. Kevin Richardson ’20, a student in the Master of Global Affairs program, conducted extensive interviews in Ukraine to write his thesis on Ukrainian language laws and their impact on national identity (see page 38). To shed light on an increasingly polarized world, theology Ph.D. student Christopher Rios studied the works of the French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne at the intersection of politics, culture, and religion. Students continue to respond to the pressures of a rapidly changing European continent and global system, and its complex challenges, with the great resolve and spirit of inquiry for which Notre Dame students are known. The Nanovic Institute is honored to support these students’ endeavors and looks forward to the year ahead with the knowledge that its students are not only equipped, but eager to meet the moment.
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Students participating in the “Great War and Modern Memory� class gather at St. Pancras railway station in London.
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A Faculty Perspective: Joining the Journey The Nanovic Institute for European Studies has been my intellectual home since I arrived on campus as a newly-minted assistant professor in 2009. Eleven years in, I still find it to be the most welcoming and natural place to engage the wider world and the life of the mind—for me and my students.
John Deak, associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and Nanovic Institute faculty fellow, recounts the journey of taking students to Europe to see firsthand the battlefields, museums, and memorials of the First World War.
Students view the exhibits at the Imperial War Museum in London.
And even as I write now, in the midst of a general lockdown and worried about the future, I can look back on the past year and see that it has been filled with many blessings— many chances to teach students more effectively, to come into contact with scholars and scholarship, and to pursue my own research and study while watching my own students’ endeavors flourish. And once again, the Nanovic has been a central supporter in what I am and what I do. Every tour needs a journey and this one is no different. And every journey begins with an idea. In the winter of 2019, my colleague in German, Professor Robert Norton, and I had an outrageous idea: We would teach a new course on the First World War and its memorialization. Easy enough. But, in addition to exposing our students to the classic literature and texts, we wanted to take our students to Europe over fall break to see firsthand the battlefields, museums, and memorials. We filled out the applications to teach a new course together and then began crunching numbers. We estimated that it would take nearly $40,000 to take 18 students to the UK, Belgium, and France. Luckily, we won the College of Arts and Letters’ single big grant for “teaching outside the classroom.” But it wasn’t enough. We went to the Nanovic Institute to apply for their Faculty-led Student Trip Grant. They came through. We had enough money to take all our students, all-expenses paid, to Europe for eight days. Naturally we were delighted. Quite a few of our students are on financial aid and needed a fully-funded trip. Several also obtained their passport for the first time to go on the trip. Traveling together made them excited for what they would find. The Nanovic Institute for European Studies
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Explore Our goal was for students to see the trenches, the uneven landscape—still scarred by shell holes and craters—and the museums and monuments. Our idea was to get students to look beyond the books and to see things with their own eyes. It would make what they read more meaningful—show them that ideas aren’t divorced from experience. This was always more than tourism, this was about opening the mind to see new things, to show students the gravity of the events and also to allow them to see how museums and memorials tell stories, make arguments—how they both convince and manipulate the viewer. It would deepen their understanding of the past and how its story is told, shaped, and retold. But it would also show them how to experience the world, not as a tourist checking things off a superficial “bucket list.” We wanted them to actively engage in what they experience, to make and find meaning in what they saw, and to see how it matters. On October 18, 2019, we boarded a bus for O’Hare and then checked into our flight to London. The next morning we were standing in the British Imperial War Museum, taking in our first exploration of how museums have interpreted the First World War. We set off the next day for Belgium, taking the Chunnel to Brussels and traveling by train to Ypres/Ieper, where the Battle of Passchendaele was fought in 1917. Our class spent three nights in Belgium, taking in two museums, and seeing countless memorials, trench reconstructions, and British and German cemeteries.
Top: Students walk towards the entrance of the Tyne Cot Cemetery and Memorial near Ypres/Ieper, Belgium. It commemorates nearly 35,000 service members from the Commonwealth. Middle Row (left to right): Caroline Elser '21 at the Passchendaele 1917 Memorial Museum, Belgium. Caitlin Fennelly '21 and others at the Passchendaele Museum. Students approach Thiepval Memorial in Somme, France. Bottom: U.S. Military Cemetery at the MeuseArgonne, Romagne-sousMontfaucon, France.
At the Passchendaele 1917 Memorial Museum, we saw the different explosives and gas shells up close as well as the guns that fired them. In the photo on the adjacent page, Caroline Elser, a junior from Arkansas—abroad for the first time—takes in the magnitude of what she was seeing. I’ll have more to say about how this trip inspired her later on. Caitlin Fennelly, a junior from Virginia, got a sense of how museums can tell different stories. This will lead her to design a senior thesis on historiography and memory. After Belgium, we would travel to Vimy Ridge, the Somme, the site of the big U.S. offensive at Meuse-Argonne, and finally end at Verdun, one of the biggest battles of the First World War. It is hard to anticipate how travel like this will affect the students. Will they throw themselves into our program; will they be moved? Will they engage with the museums and their stories? We wondered and hoped. But the students once again showed us just how worthwhile these types of experiences are for them. Travel brought us all closer together. We stood as a group of 21 students and professors in a field still scarred by the trenches and shell holes in the middle of northern France. Looking out at the Ancre valley below at where the British Commonwealth Troops were positioned. We were on the high ground, in the German trenches. We could imagine the British troops advancing up the hill, a suicide attack that their generals assured them would be victorious. They were mowed down to a man on that hill by machine guns on 1 July 1916—the worst day in the history of the British Military. Some of us stood in stony silence. Others started to cry. Above us, towered the Thiepval Memorial, a triumphal arch inscribed with nearly 75,000 names, names of soldiers who lost their lives at the Battle of the Somme, and— in the euphemism of the memorial—were deprived of the proper burial given to their comrades. In other words, they were obliterated by artillery. 75,000 men from one army in one battle, who were never found. The Germans have no memorial there. Their dead are still missing.
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The “Great War and Modern Memory” cohort together at a monument inside the U.S. WWI Memorial near Ypres/Ieper, Belgium.
Everyone had their moment when the experiences overwhelmed their emotional capacity to take it all in. Mine came at the U.S. Military Cemetery at the Meuse-Argonne. Nearly 12,000 American soldiers—who died during the last major offensive on the Western Front—are buried there, somewhere in northwestern France. Unlike the British or German cemeteries, which concentrate their war dead in dense rows, the U.S. cemetery gave every soldier his own stone and his own space. One can take in more fully the human cost of war. I walked through the cemetery and up the hill to the visitor center and took in the whole scene: 12,000 graves on the side of a massive hill. I sat on the steps and just wept. Before I knew it, all the students, emerging from the visitor center, sat around me in a protective circle and let me cry. No one said anything—they didn’t have to. They knew what I felt. They felt it too.
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There were fun moments too. One of our last nights, we ate at a British-style restaurant in Verdun—The Sherlock Holmes. The restaurant was one of the only ones in the small city that could accommodate a group of 21. Almost all of the students selected the hamburger from the pre-circulated menu. And, I wish you could have seen the look on their faces when, on the bus microphone, I informed them that since we were in France—where it is rude to eat at the table with your hands—that they would have to eat their burgers with a knife and fork. The incredulous looks are something I will always remember. But, everyone in good spirits and humor, gave the oversized pub burgers their best effort, sawing at the crusty bread with serrated knives and picking up the bun, pickles, lettuce and tomato with their forks in their left hands. For me, this was another moment when the students dove into the experience and embraced it.
These types of experiences are not a dime-a-dozen. Our students remarked, later, on the profound ways that integrating travel into a course affected them. Caroline Elser designed a senior honors thesis project that will examine the common soldiers’ perceptions of the battle of the Somme, comparing that to the way the generals viewed the war. Her research will take her back to the Imperial War Museum in London, where they archive diaries and have a vast collection of soldiers’ recordings. The Nanovic Institute awarded her the R. Stephen and Ruth Barrett Prize for her project. Caitlin Fennelly was struck by how each museum told different, often conflicting stories. She took this knowledge and designed a senior honors thesis for her degree in the Program of Liberal Studies, which will examine how the history of the Risorgimento has been told and retold after the Unification of Italy in 1861. These are just two students whose entire undergraduate trajectory has been changed as a result of this travel.
But there have been other, equally fundamental, manifestations of the success of the experience of travel and a deeper, more meaningful educational experience. Our “Great War and Modern Memory” class has not met—officially—since December 2019. But, with the mandate of social distancing and the scattering of our students to the ends of the earth, our class met this spring—online—for Friday night get-togethers. They have become friends because of their shared experiences. It is these types of experiences that are so hard to quantify and, at the same time, so worthwhile, that have convinced me that Notre Dame succeeds most when we do what we’re best at: engaging students as whole persons, educating their mind and spirit, challenging them to exist as critically-thinking moral creatures, and joining them on their journey as fellow travelers. Students long for this type of education— it is what brings them to us in the first place.
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Connect “I would just like to commend the work of the Nanovic Institute of Notre Dame. I hope the work that you do here in this Institute—and I thank you for it—can be complemented by the work done in Europe, working on the same level of sending people to the United States, and that we can find a way to continue the enormous strength of transatlantic bonds which have taken us a long way in the twentieth century, and can still take us a long way in the twenty-first.” David O’Sullivan 2019 Nanovic Forum Lecturer
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Europe and the United States THE NANOVIC FORUM WITH DAVID O'SULLIVAN
David O’Sullivan, former EU Ambassador to the U.S., delivers the 2019 Nanovic Forum Lecture to the Notre Dame community (top) and tours the campus with Senior Associate Director Monica Caro (left). Master of Global Affairs students Viyaleta Farysheuskaya ’21 and Zhanaiym Kozybay ’21 (below) listen to Ambassador O’Sullivan at the 2019 Nanovic Forum.
Just months after concluding his appointment as European Union ambassador to the United States, David O’Sullivan delivered the 2019 Nanovic Forum lecture with poise and candor on September 18, 2019. His lecture, “Europe and the United States: Friends and Allies, or Rivals?” explored the complexities that challenge and provide opportunities for American-European relations and was well-attended by the Notre Dame community. While O’Sullivan’s lecture was diplomatic, as one might expect from an ambassador and career civil servant, he addressed difficult and controversial topics head-on and with a welcome frankness. O’Sullivan began with a comprehensive look at the immediate and lasting impacts of American involvement in global affairs. He then spoke at length to the intricacies of European cultures and attitudes that, fortified by the European Union, helped to create one of the largest economies in the world. O’Sullivan did not shy away from controversial topics that populate international headlines, including the implications of Brexit, the surge of nationalism in Europe, or the arrival of the Trump administration from a European perspective. “Over the course of an hour, I was able to learn from Mr. O’Sullivan’s expertise and unique insight into state diplomacy, current European relations, and the transatlantic relationship,” said Moritz S. Graefrath, a Nanovic Institute graduate fellow and Ph.D. candidate in political science. “His perspective on these issues proved incredibly enlightening and made me realize once again how much academics stand to benefit from a closer engagement with the policy world.” Clare O’Hare, a graduate fellow and doctoral candidate at Notre Dame Law School, shared, “The opportunities afforded by the Nanovic Institute never cease to amaze me.” O’Hare served as a teaching assistant in Nanovic Faculty Fellow Andy Gould’s European politics class, whose students O’Sullivan spoke to during his visit. “[O’Sullivan’s] remarks combined a deep historical understanding of European politics and societies with the lessons of a lifetime of engagement in policymaking and diplomacy in Europe, Africa, Japan, the United States, and around the world,” Gould said. “He took the students behind the news headlines to the big values at stake in European politics today. The Ambassador’s responses to questions from the students and the back-and-forth discussion showed that he and they were eager to get as much out of their time together as possible; he and the students really connected.” O’Sullivan’s conversations with the Notre Dame community went beyond the classroom setting. Enzo Ambrose ’21, a political science major and member of the Transnational European Studies Seminar in Washington DC, interviewed Ambassador O’Sullivan on Brexit, climate change, and global affairs issues. O’Sullivan also discussed Irish cultural history during a tour of the Snite Museum of Art led by Nanovic Institute Faculty Fellow Cheryl Snay and the Snite’s curator of photographs, David Acton. The Nanovic Institute for European Studies
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Max Bergholz, author of Violence as a Generative Force and associate professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal, lectures in the Elizabeth E. Nanovic Seminar Room as part of the 2019 Laura Shannon Prize award ceremony.
“I am grateful to Laura and Michael Shannon for establishing this prize and for their support of the social sciences and humanities . . . when these subjects and these fields of study are somewhat under attack from various parties in North America.” Max Bergholz 2019 Laura Shannon Prize Winner Published in 2016 by Cornell University Press, Violence as a Generative Force deserves to be read, according to the final jury, “not only by Europeanists but by anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of mass violence.” Shinjini Chattopadhyay, Nanovic graduate fellow and doctoral student in the Department of English, asks Bergholz how he handles “gaps of silences” in local archives while performing research and telling histories.
Histories of Violence THE LAURA SHANNON PRIZE WITH MAX BERGHOLZ On November 21, 2019, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies presented the 2019 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies to Max Bergholz for his book Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community, published by Cornell University Press. Bergholz, associate professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal, delivered a public lecture, “Telling Histories of Violence without Borders,” as part of the award ceremony. In his lecture, Bergholz discussed how scholars might tell histories of violence in ways that capture local specifics but also transcend temporal, geographical, and disciplinary borders that often delineate the form that such histories can take. His lecture explored three subjects: first, the problem of disciplinary provincialism; second, the transformative experience of fieldwork; and, third, the practice of historical empathy. In telling stories about the making of Violence as a Generative Force, a microhistory of a community that was convulsed by intercommunal violence during the summer of 1941, Bergholz illuminated the importance of these subjects and set the stage for a broader reflection about how histories of violence can break new empirical and theoretical ground while capturing the attention of the widest possible audience.
Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies MEMBERS OF THE 2019 JURY Ruth Abbey Professor of Political Science University of Notre Dame Jeffrey J. Anderson Graf Goltz Professor and Director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies Georgetown University Alexander Martin Professor of History University of Notre Dame John Merriman
The Laura Shannon Prize, one of the preeminent prizes for Charles Seymour Professor of History Yale University European studies, is awarded each year to the best book that Susan G. Pedersen transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to Gouverneur Morris Professor of History stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe Columbia University as a whole. The 2019 cycle of the award considered books in history and social sciences published in 2016 or 2017. Examining the intercommunal violence in a community on the border of Bosnia and Croatia, Violence as a Generative Force received high praise by the Shannon Prize final jury: “Restrained, humane, and beautifully written, and drawing intelligently on ethnography, psychology, and genocide studies, Violence as a Generative Force deserves to be read not only by Europeanists but by anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of mass violence.” In his introduction of Bergholz, Mark T. Kettler, postdoctoral research associate, lauded the prizewinning book as a “remarkable achievement in scholarship,” forecasting that students of mass violence “will reflect upon Bergholz’s insights for years to come.” During his visit to Notre Dame, Bergholz had the opportunity to meet with students in Nanovic Faculty Fellow and Professor of History Alexander Martin’s class as well as serve as the special guest for the Nanovic Institute’s “Football Friday Donuts” event before the Fighting Irish took on the USC Trojans.
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Connect People and Partnerships NANOVIC GRADUATE FELLOWS The Nanovic Institute has developed a new program that brings graduate students in European studies more closely into its life and operation. A complementary cohort to the graduate students who have won dissertation completion fellowships, these doctoral students led several exciting new initiatives, including an interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar called "Contesting Europe."
Shinjini Chattopadhyay Department of English Chattopadhyay explores how the urban texture is constructed in the works of James Joyce. She plans to conduct a genetic study of the avant-textes of Joyce to understand how he incorporates multiple urban fabrics within the overarching presence of the Hibernian metropolis.
Jake Coen Medieval Institute Coen studies violence and political rhetoric. His dissertation research focuses primarily on the concept of tyranny in ninth- and tenth-century France and Germany, though he is also interested in working with vernacular literary and legal traditions across Europe.
Moritz S. Graefrath Department of Political Science Graefrath specializes in international relations. His research interests include international relations theory, security studies, and grand strategy with a particular regional focus on Western Europe.
Alec Hahus Department of Political Science Hahus specializes in international relations and comparative politics. His research focuses on religion in politics and has previously addressed the integration of religion and religious ideas into U.S. foreign policy. He plans to further explore why and how political elites use religious ideas to frame political issues.
Clare O'Hare Law School, JSD Program O'Hare works at the intersection of comparative politics and international political economy. She is especially interested in legal pluralism. Current projects examine the role of corporate lawyers and multinational corporations in the diffusion of English common law institutional structures to civil law jurisdictions in Europe.
Anna Vincenzi Department of History Vincenzi graduated this May with a Ph.D. in history. With numerous populist movements gaining popularity across Europe and challenging the EU’s existence, her research examines a time when Europe was at a similar crossroad, the “Age of Revolution� (1765-1848). How could the inequalities of the Old Regime be solved? How could people assert their sovereignty? How to pursue social and political change? These were crucial questions for peoples across Europe in the eighteenth century and remain crucial questions for European democracies today.
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GRADUATE DISSERTATION FELLOWS The Nanovic Institute awards fellowships to support graduate students writing dissertations on topics within European studies. The Paul G. Tobin Dissertation Fellowship and the Dominica and Frank Annese Fellowship in Graduate Studies fund graduate students over the course of an academic year as they conduct research and write their dissertations, allowing students to devote full attention to their project for an entire academic year.
Ala Fink Department of English Fink’s dissertation, “Re-forming Righteousness: Milton’s Hebraic Poetics,” argues that Milton’s theology and exegesis of righteousness is informed by Hebrew and Jewish exegesis, and that an ethics of righteousness shapes the poetics of Milton’s major poems. A second, long-term project involves the comparison of conceptualizations of literal interpretation in Reformation exegesis through an analysis of early modern discourse on literalism and the exegesis that attends it. She has presented papers at the Northeast Modern Language Association, the Newberry Library, and the Renaissance Society of America. She has served as an assistant editor for Milton Studies. Roberto De La Noval Department of Theology De La Noval studies the history of Christian thought. His research concentrates on Eastern Christianity, from Origen of Alexandria’s biblical exegesis to medieval Byzantine theologies of religious images to 19th- and 20th-century exiled, Russian religious thinkers. He brings critical theory to bear on the study of ancient religious texts in the service of fresh and transformative readings; in turn, he uses the resources of the tradition in order to stake interventions in contemporary debates. A native speaker of Spanish who works with Russian texts, his forthcoming book is a translation of writings by the early 20th c. Marxist-turnedOrthodox priest Sergius Bulgakov, a political dissident who was exiled from his homeland. Paul McEldowney Department of Philosophy A Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Philosophy, McEldowney's research focuses on logic, the philosophy of logic, and the philosophy of mathematics. In his dissertation, McEldowney develops and defends a distinctively new model-theoretic approach to logicism inspired by recent work in model theory. He also has serious research interests in the history of 19th- and 20th-century philosophy (Kant, German idealism, early analytic, pragmatism, phenomenology). Outside of philosophy, McEldowney is passionate about prison education and translating Vietnamese poetry.
“Bringing together doctoral students united by their interest in the study of Europe, the Nanovic graduate fellows initiative has developed into an exciting interdisciplinary hub for advancing the latest research on the most pressing issues facing the continent today.” Moritz S. Graefrath Ph.D. Student in Political Science and Nanovic Graduate Fellow The Nanovic Institute for European Studies The Nanovic Institute for European Studies
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BETTER TOGETHER This past year, the Nanovic Institute created a new faculty grant to support interdepartmental research clusters— multi-disciplinary, multi-faculty groups organized around a theme relevant to European studies, including: Intersections: A Research Cluster on CrossCultural and Inter-Religious Encounter in European Contexts Led by Fr. Greg Haake (Romance Languages and Literatures), Sarah Shorthall (History), and Sonja Stojanovic (Romance Languages and Literatures);
Nanovic faculty fellows Mary Flannery, associate dean of undergraduate studies in the Department of Economics, and Kirk Doran, Henkels Family Collegiate Chair and associate professor of economics, celebrate the accomplishments of their peers from the prior year at the Gallery of European Studies.
Serving as an intellectual home for a growing number of faculty from across the disciplines, this past year the Nanovic Institute for European Studies was proud to support more than 50 new projects, spanning 16 countries, led by faculty across more than a dozen departments in the College of Arts and Letters, as well as faculty in the Keough School of Global Affairs, College of Engineering, Mendoza College of Business, and School of Architecture, among others. Notably, more than a quarter of these projects were facultyguided student opportunities, in which, as Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of History John Deak described, faculty join students “on their journey as fellow travelers.” Among other opportunities, the Institute facilitates faculty-led student trips to Europe to conduct novel research or enhance courses with experiential learning. Examples include two faculty-led student trips to Ireland this past spring, one of which involved the 3D mapping of churches and heritage sites by architecture and engineering students and the other which brought a writing course of AnBryce Scholars, first-year students who are also the first in their families to go to college, their first international experience.
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Modeling the Mind in the History of European Philosophy Led by Therese Cory (Philosophy), Katharina Kraus (Philosophy), and Denis Robichaud (Program of Liberal Studies); Place, Memory, Story in Contemporary Calabria: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Recuperation of Heritage Led by W. Martin Bloomer (Classics), Meredith Chesson (Anthropology), and Charles Leavitt (Romance Languages and Literatures).
Another collaborative and interdisciplinary research group that the Institute hosts is the longstanding Cultural Transformations in Modern Europe reading group. Regularly lauded by its participating fellows, it was also recently credited by Emily Wang (German and Russian Languages and Literatures) upon receiving a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and again by Katie Jarvis (History) after her book, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, won the 2020 Louis A. Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
NEW FACULTY FELLOWS This past year, the Institute welcomed 12 new faculty fellows from nine departments in the College of Arts and Letters and the Keough School of Global Affairs to advance the Institute’s mission. More than 100 fellows invested in European studies, spanning more than two dozen departments and every college and school at Notre Dame, call the Institute home.
Katie Bugyis Assistant Professor Program of Liberal Studies
Mariana Candido Associate Professor Department of History
Diane Desierto Associate Professor Keough School of Global Affairs
Mary Flannery Associate Chair and Director of Undergraduate Studies Department of Economics
Johanna Frymoyer Assistant Professor Department of Music
Korey Garibaldi Assistant Professor Department of American Studies
Ian Johnson P. J. Moran Family Assistant Professor Department of History
Ulrich Lehner William K. Warren Professor Department of Theology
Joshua Lund Professor of Spanish and Director of Graduate Studies Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Raymond Offenheiser William J. Pulte Director and Associate Professor of the Practice Pulte Institute for Global Development and Keough School of Global Affairs
Paul Perrin Director of Monitoring and Evaluation and Associate Professor of the Practice Pulte Institute for Global Development and Keough School of Global Affairs
Alisha Reaves Assistant Teaching Professor Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
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Connect CATHOLIC UNIVERSITIES PARTNERSHIP AND VISITING SCHOLARS The variety of engagements this year illustrate the Institute’s expanding network and impact on scholars and institutions across Europe. The Institute hosted meetings with delegations from Ukraine and Azerbaijan organized through the Open World Program. Gabriella Saputelli, a researcher at the Institute for the Study of Regionalism, Federalism, and Self-Government in the National Research Council in Rome served as U.S.-Italian Fulbright assistant professor in the spring. She engaged with students and faculty colleagues while teaching “Rule of Law and Fundamental Rights in Europe.” Three scholars enjoyed research stays for the semester through the Patrick and Angela Adams Fellowship for Catholic Higher Education in Post-Communist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Jela Kehoe, a scholar from the Catholic University of Ružomberok, Slovakia noted that the opportunity “provided me with access to a variety and a vast amount of research material, neither of which could be replicated in Slovakia. I am convinced that my research at Notre Dame will be strongly felt in the quality, relevance and the volume of my publications.” The Institute continued to expand its support of leadership development in the Catholic Universities Partnership as well. In July 2019, 21 academic leaders participated in the third annual summer leadership program, which was funded by a grant from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ fund to aid the Church in Central and Eastern Europe. The program received similar funding for July 2020, which will be postponed until summer 2021. Fortuitously, in the fall before the pandemic, the Institute launched a series of webinars for the 58 alumni of the program. These were well received and were shared by recording after the live session. One participant noted, “they help me immensely to get back my motivation: just knowing that I am not left to myself, but so thoughtfully cared for.” The webinar series continued in the spring and summer with additional offerings. To continue the training, the Institute has also envisioned an advanced leadership program as a second-level course. Planned for several days in Rome in summer 2021, it would be a critical step to focus on building resilience in leaders, particularly needed in these tumultuous and austere times. While the pandemic caused the cancellation of the annual meeting that would have been hosted in Tbilisi, Georgia, it had the happy consequence that the group of leaders is now connecting more regularly by Zoom. The group continues to share experiences in this new, more-virtual world, including ways to collaborate in teaching online courses, to connect students remotely across time zones and continents, and to develop joint projects. These connections enrich missions, form friendships, and ultimately contribute to the flourishing of individuals and institutions—one relationship at a time.
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Visiting scholars Gabriella Saputelli (left) and Jela Kehoe (right) at the Nanovic Institute.
FALL 2019 Pavol Hurbánek Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia (CUP) Grzegorz Skrobotowicz The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland (CUP) Volodymyr Turchynovskyy Ukrainian Catholic University, Ukraine (CUP) SPRING 2020 Jela Kehoe Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia (CUP) Gabriella Saputelli Distinguished Visiting U.S.-Italian Fulbright Assistant Professor
2019-2020 Event Highlights
A full room looks on at the 2019 Nanovic Forum with Ambassador David O'Sullivan.
Policy Expert Contributes to Nanovic Conversation on Migration September 5, 2019 In her Nanovic lecture, Elizabeth Ferris, research professor with the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and adjunct professor with Georgetown Law School, explored the pressures, contradictions, and potential consequences of European policies toward refugees arriving on its borders in search of safety. Visiting Scholar Explores Mediation in Criminal Cases, Restorative Justice in East-Central Europe September 17, 2019 Grzegorz Skrobotowicz, a professor of law, canon law, and administration at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, discussed why mediation in criminal cases, despite its extreme importance for restorative justice, is rarely used in Poland and Central Europe in his Visiting Scholar Lecture. Former EU Ambassador to the U.S. Converses with ND Community on European and Global Affairs at Nanovic Forum September 18, 2019 David O'Sullivan, former European Union ambassador to the United States, delivered the 2019 Nanovic Forum Lecture, “Europe and the United States: Friends and Allies, or Rivals?” in Jenkins Nanovic Halls. See page 15.
Nanovic Institute Postdoc Examines Influential Proposals for Establishing German Imperial Rule in Eastern Europe during WWI September 25, 2019 Mark T. Kettler, a postdoctoral research associate with the Nanovic Institute, offered a public lecture, “Before Lebensraum Meant Genocide,” as part of the Nanovic Institute's lunchtime lecture series. In his talk, Kettler complicates the link between Lebensraum (living spaces) and genocide by closely examining German proposals for reordering Eastern Europe. Panel of Experts Discuss Brexit, Future of Ireland at Inaugural Nanovic Washington Policy Forum October 24, 2019 Concluding the DC residency of the Transnational European Studies Seminar was the inaugural Nanovic Washington Policy Forum, “Brexit, Brinkmanship, and the Future of Ireland: The Role of the U.S. in Safeguarding the Northern Ireland Peace Process,” hosted at the Keough School’s Washington, DC office. See page 5. Graduate Students from across Notre Dame Gather at Nanovic Social October 29, 2019 Graduate students escaped their study carrels to connect with other postgrads across campus at the Nanovic Institute’s fall 2019 Graduate Student Social. This once-a-semester open house offered free food and beverages, as well as free books for perusal and acquisition. The Nanovic Institute for European Studies
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Master of Global Affairs Student, Notre Dame Undergraduate Moderate Brexit Flash Panel November 4, 2019 Moderated by MGA student Dominic Scarcelli and Mary Clare Enright ’20, Stepan Family College Professor of Economics Rüdiger Bachmann and political scientist Barry Colfer, Ph.D., visiting scholar at Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, discussed the then-current state of Brexit in the Elizabeth E. Nanovic Seminar Room in Jenkins Nanovic Halls.
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Visiting Scholar Pavol Hurbánek Analyzes Slovakia, Other Eastern European Countries That Recently Joined the EU November 6, 2019 In his Nanovic Institute Visiting Scholar Lecture, “Front-Runner or Laggard? Slovakia and Eastern Europe After 30 Years of Freedom,” Pavol Hurbánek, a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia, discussed the geographical, social, economic, and cultural aspects of recent developments in Slovakia and other Eastern European countries that joined the European Union in the current millennium.
Above: Speakers and participants from “1989: Reconsidering the Nation and Its Alternatives in Central & Eastern Europe" gather in the Forum of Jenkins Nanovic Halls to discuss a conference panel.
1989: AUTUMN OF NATIONS
Right: Grzegorz Ekiert, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, delivers the keynote address entitled, "The Politics of East Central Europe 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall," at the 1989 conference. Pavol Hurbánek, fall 2019 visiting scholar at the Nanovic Institute, listens in the audience (below).
Nanovic Institute Hosts Conference on 30th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Brings Prominent European Scholars to Notre Dame November 8-10, 2019 On the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Institute hosted “1989: Reconsidering the Nation and Its Alternatives in Central & Eastern Europe.” This conference was cosponsored by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). See sidebar. Nanovic Institute Draws Strong Undergraduate Turnout at 2019 Eurocup November 13, 2019 In concert with the Institute's mission to promote European studies at Notre Dame, every undergraduate residence hall on campus was invited to compete in a night of European-themed trivia. More than 60 undergraduates—in teams of three to five students—competed for the prize cup.
The collapse of socialist regimes across Eastern Europe in 1989 has often been described as an “autumn of nations,” a process of national liberation from unaccountable governments through the exercise of popular will. But during and after 1989, national mobilization also coincided with tectonic international and supranational developments: the collapse of the Soviet empire, the retrenchment of socialist internationalism, the expansion of NATO, and the widening scope of European integration, to name only a few. On the thirtieth anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall, the Institute hosted an interdisciplinary conference, “1989: Reconsidering the Nation and Its Alternatives in Central & Eastern Europe,” to examine notions of the European “nation,” “national identity,” and alternative modes of political mobilization in 1989, its aftermath, and its commemoration. With distinguished speakers including Grzegorz Ekiert, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (above), and Ronald Grigor Suny, William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan, the conference gathered top European studies scholars from across the world to explore the overthrow of state socialism throughout Europe in 1989, the interaction between collective memories of communism and national identity, and how the legacies of socialism and its collapse continue to influence Central and Eastern Europe today.
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Connect the social sciences faculty at the Ukrainian Catholic University, presented a lunchtime lecture entitled, “The Revolution of Dignity and Public Culture: How the Ukrainian Experience Impacts the Global Agenda.” Laura Shannon Prize Winner Compels Historians to Embrace Outside Disciplines, Methods in Telling Histories of Violence at Award Ceremony November 21, 2019 The Nanovic Institute presented the 2019 Laura Shannon Prize to Max Bergholz, author of Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community, published by Cornell University Press. See page 17. Nanovic Institute Counts Down the United Kingdom’s Final Hours in the EU with Notre Dame Students, Faculty January 31, 2020 On Brexit day, the Nanovic Institute hosted “Brexit: The Final Countdown,” an informal event with high tea and conversation to count down the UK's final hour within the European Union. Undergraduates Flock to Nanovic Student Social for Games and Grub February 5, 2020 The Nanovic Institute invited all undergraduate students to a spring social in the forum of Jenkins Nanovic Halls. With everything from Swedish meatballs and mac n' cheese to giant Jenga and corn hole, undergraduates stopped by for a great time and a well-deserved break.
Consul General of Germany in Chicago Reflects on Importance of the European Union during Visit November 18, 2019 Wolfgang Mössinger, Consul General of Germany in Chicago, offered a lecture, “The New Cold War: Liberal Democracy vs Authoritarianism. Why the EU Is Today More Important Than Ever Before,” as part of the Nanovic Institute’s Conversations with Diplomats lecture series. Visiting Scholar Recounts Ukrainian Revolution Against Backdrop of Contemporary Global Affairs November 20, 2019 A returning Nanovic visiting scholar, Volodymyr Turchynovskyy, director of the International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues and dean of
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German Embassy Counselor Visits Nanovic, Discusses Labor Issues with Students and Faculty March 2, 2020 Anja Wehler-Schoeck, a counselor at the German Embassy in Washington, DC, shared remarks on labor issues over lunch with faculty and Master of Global Affairs students. This event was organized with the help of Faculty Fellow Mary Flannery and Director of the Higgins Labor Program of the Center for Social Concerns Daniel Graff. Nanovic Faculty Fellows Convene to Celebrate the Accomplishments of Colleagues March 3, 2020 Celebrating the accomplishments of Nanovic faculty fellows from the prior year, the Gallery of European Studies displayed works from 25 fellows, fostering conversation amongst colleagues from across the University.
Left: Senior Associate Director Monica Caro walks with Wolfgang Mรถssinger, Consul General of Germany in Chicago, and Nanovic Graduate Fellow Moritz S. Graefrath. Above: Students count down the UK's final hour in the European Union over tea in the Nanovic Commons Room. Right: Nanovic Fellows Robert Randolf Coleman, Professor Emeritus of Renaissance & Baroque Art History, and Ingrid Rowland, Professor of Architecture, converse while viewing the Gallery of European Studies in the Forum of Jenkins Nanovic Halls.
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Alina Haliliuc, associate professor at Denison University, introduces 12:08 East of Bucharest in the Browning Cinema.
EUROPE THROUGH FILM: A NEW STUDENT CONNECTION The Nanovic Film Series, now in the 15th year of its partnership with the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, continued to reach a wide audience of students, faculty, staff, and members of the greater campus community interested in exploring Europe through cinema, with its six films drawing more than 250 attendees. Thanks to the creation of the 1-credit film course “Europe through Film,” based around the film series and taught by Faculty Fellow James Collins, professor and chair of the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, this year’s series was able to reach undergraduate students in new ways and stimulate questions and sustained discussion about the nature of Europe today. The course, which the Institute plans to offer in future semesters, focuses on the relationship between contemporary European cinema and the European ideas and realities it finds compelling in terms of social and imaginative power. Following the cancellation of four spring semester films due to emergence of the coronavirus, and as part of its “Visit Europe Online” series, the Institute curated a series of European films for the viewing enrichment of its community. Many of these films are accessible for free online screening with Notre Dame login credentials, an appropriate subscription, or through your public library.
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FILM SERIES I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018) and Pain and Glory (2019) Introduced by Nanovic Faculty Fellow James Collins Professor and Chair Department of Film, Television, and Theatre At War (2018) Introduced by Nanovic Faculty Fellow Olivier Morel Associate Professor Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures and Film, Television, and Theatre Leviathan (2014) Introduced by Nanovic Faculty Fellow Susanne Wengle Associate Professor Department of Political Science 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) Introduced by Alina Haliliuc Associate Professor Departments of Communication and International Studies Denison University The Waldheim Waltz (2018) Introduced by Nanovic Faculty Fellow Clemens Sedmak Professor of Social Ethics Keough School of Global Affairs
A New Virtual Reality VIRTUAL OUTREACH In this increasingly virtual world and in concert with the mission to promote European studies at Notre Dame, the Nanovic Institute is committed to invest, design, and enact new ways to interface with its various communities. In lieu of physical events due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Institute adopted ways to host webinars, livestreamed lectures, and virtual meetings such as its spring advisory board meeting.
Promoting European Studies at Notre Dame: Virtual Europe Online March 31, 2020 The Institute’s new “Visit Europe Online” series has invited the Nanovic community to explore Europe in new ways. Including a collection of Laura Shannon Prize-winning books, a curated list of European museums that offer interactive digital experiences for users, and a
Interim Director Leads Virtual Lecture on the Collective Memory of Europe April 7, 2020 Following the coronavirus’s reshaping of the Institute’s spring events calendar, Interim Director Clemens Sedmak led a virtual lecture entitled “Europe and the Ethics of Remembering.” While each European country has had its own way of remembering the
Weekly Featured News Stories Spring 2020 Featured news stories published weekly on the Nanovic website provided not just further opportunities of engagement with the Institute, but also served as a vehicle to showcase the breadth of the Institute’s grants programs, academic rigor, and global reach. Stories, including a piece on student Paolo Mazzara '23 aiding
vetted selection of Weimar-era German films that are viewable at no-cost, “Visit Europe Online” has aimed to become a one-stop-shop for virtual opportunities of engagement with European culture and scholarship at Notre Dame.
past and of writing its history, there have been significant events that transcend national histories and are part of “the collective memory” of Europe, e.g., the First World War, the Holocaust, the beginnings of the European Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Brexit. In his lecture, available online, Sedmak evaluated the need for shared and common memories in order to have a true “Union of European states.”
Italian healthcare workers amid the pandemic and op-eds by Nanovic Graduate Fellow Clare O’Hare, were the fruits of productive collaboration with units across the University, such as Notre Dame’s Strategic Content team and the KeoughNaughton Institute for Irish Studies. Augmenting these enhanced content offerings, Clemens Sedmak has served as managing editor of the Keough School’s new “Dignity and Development” blog, bringing a Nanovic voice to the Keough School conversation.
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Transform
“As a finance and French major, the Nanovic Institute has afforded me incredibly useful interdisciplinary experiences that have allowed me to combine my interests and gather information for my future studies and research.” Mary Kate Kriscovich ’20 Minor in European Studies Paris, France
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Undergraduate Students INSTITUTE AWARDS WEGS PRIZE Mary Kate Kriscovich '20 Finance and French Minor in European Studies
Mary Kate Kriscovich ’20 was awarded the 2020 J. Robert Wegs Prize for Best Minor in European Studies Capstone Essay for “Social Enterprise Institutions in France.” A 15 to 20-page scholarly research paper, the capstone essay is the final requirement of the Minor in European Studies and is written by students over the course of a semester on a European topic with the guidance of Notre Dame faculty advisors. “The Wegs Prize serves to honor and remember the founding director of the Institute, Professor Wegs, who was committed to enriching undergraduate education and to excellence in scholarship,” says Clemens Sedmak, interim director of the Nanovic Institute. “Mary Kate Kriscovich’s essay particularly deserves this year’s Wegs Prize because her work demonstrated sustained research, included travel to Europe to deepen her questions and understanding, and presented her conclusions in admirable prose. It is a pleasure to award her this prize on behalf of the Nanovic Institute.” In her prize-winning essay, Kriscovich explores how social enterprises—businesses whose primary concern is to serve the public good—are understood in France and how they add value to society. She also demonstrates that individuals strongly motivated by a sense of altruism or a desire to positively influence society are increasingly likely to choose to work in the social enterprise industry. “My analysis takes an in-depth look at social enterprise institutions and considers what are some personal motivations among persons who go
into this field,” says Kriscovich. “I wanted to find out why the government structure in France was more favorable to social businesses, as well as to understand the motivations of their owners. As I am very interested in going into social business, it was useful for me to have many perspectives.” On her research trip to France last spring, Kriscovich met several social business owners. She was struck by how each entrepreneur spoke about their own motivations for engaging in this type of work—even if it meant less financial and professional security. With guidance from Sonja Stojanovic, assistant professor of French and Nanovic faculty fellow, Kriscovich shaped those conversations from her first trip into a narrow research topic—one that could link to concepts from her coursework at Notre Dame and position her to ask more targeted, specific questions when she would return to France later in the year. “Mary’s capstone is the result of an ambitious and innovative project evolving from research on the ground,” says Stojanovic. “Mary is an exemplary and diligent student, and it was a rewarding experience for me to work with her on this project.” In addition to working in Chicago post-graduation for West Monroe Partners, a management and technology consulting firm, Kriscovich hopes to learn more about social enterprises in France in order to conduct further in-depth analysis and a comparison between the social entrepreneurial cultures of France and America. The Wegs Prize was established in 2012 to honor the late J. Robert Wegs, founding director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre Dame. The development of the Minor in European Studies is but one of Professor Wegs’s many contributions to the Nanovic Institute.
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Transform RELIGION, MIGRATION, AND COMMUNAL MEMORY IN GREECE Elsa Barron '21 Biology and Peace Studies with a minor in Sustainability
For the first time in more than 200 years, the faithful gather at a public mosque in Athens, Greece. A major gateway for westward migrants along the Mediterranean coast, Athens has seen unprecedented waves of migration in recent years, including the arrival of more than 800,000 predominately Muslim refugees since 2015. Drawing on communal memories of the Ottoman Empire and its colonizing forces, many Greeks, who comprise the 95% Greek Orthodox majority, view present-day migrants through the same lens. This shared history is held up as a reason why the growing Muslim community in Athens is not more widely received by prevailing religious and government officials, despite their increased numbers and, in turn, opportunities for interreligious dialogue. “The interaction between the Christian west and the Islamic east plays out in Athens in a unique way,” says Elsa Barron, junior biology and peace studies major at the University of Notre Dame and two-time grant recipient from the Nanovic Institute. “There’s a huge opportunity to study Islam in Europe as part of an expanding research frontier.” Barron’s research on the political and religious dynamics surrounding the construction of the first official mosque in Athens was sparked while analyzing interviews with refugees to assess religion’s role on migrant assimilation and integration into Europe. Nanovic Institute Faculty Fellow Rev. Robert Dowd, C.S.C., served as faculty mentor for Barron’s research projects, including her transcription analysis. “Elsa’s research reveals a great deal of variation in the extent to which the Greek community promotes empathy with migrants, and we are currently grappling with plausible explanations for this variation,” says Dowd.
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Barron says, “For a large European city, Athens is an anomaly. My research attempts to uncover why this city doesn’t have an official mosque, despite having one of the largest populations of Muslim refugees in Europe.” During Barron’s first winter researching migration and religion in Athens, funded by a Nanovic Institute student grant, she investigated how Muslim migrants and native Greeks view the construction of the mosque. Her findings suggest that for Muslim migrants the presence of a physical mosque in Athens is a welcoming sign, if not one of government support, and gives them a place to anchor their life in a new country. On the other side of the study, the largely conservative Greek population, of whom 65% hold unfavorable views of Muslims, proved wary of the increase of Muslims in Athens and unlikely to support the mosque’s construction. Barron’s research seeks to bring clarity to an otherwise unsettled dialogue. Using a series of semi-structured interviews, she engaged with migrants, those who work with migrants, NGOs like the Muslim Association of Greece, religious organizations, and contacts gathered from Golden Dawn to better understand the diverse perspectives on Islam in Athens and the possible implications of this new mosque. “The inherent political power that the Islamic community would receive through state recognition—being able to send a delegate to talk with representatives, and the dignity of having a space— unfortunately doesn’t come without reservation from the Greek community,” says Barron. Drawing inspiration from her coursework back at Notre Dame, Barron expanded her research on the mosque in Athens to encompass its implications on peacebuilding in Greece and returned to Athens on a second Nanovic grant. She examined how the construction of the public mosque could help resolve political problems faced by Athens’s Muslim community, quell fears of concerned Greek citizens,
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Elsa Barron '21 speaks with the founder of the Muslim Association of Greece, Naim el-Ghandour (far left).
“The projects were incredibly meaningful to my studies and allowed me to witness the interplay between religion, migration, and identity in Europe....Nanovic research opportunities have brought my studies to life.” and potentially foster interfaith peacebuilding through dialogue, integration, and education. “A public mosque provides a dignified place of worship for Muslims, support to the religious minority and most vulnerable in Greek society, and augments the safety of Greek residents, Muslims and non-Muslims alike,” says Barron. “From religious services in the local language to opportunities for the Greek education system to become more comprehensive and inclusive, the relationship between the Greek government and an Islamic institution in the city builds the foundation for many possible integration programs, which is an essential step for peacebuilding in any community.” Barron recalls a singular moment in her fieldwork when she witnessed a crowd of Muslims pouring into one of the more than one hundred unofficial underground mosques in the city on an unmarked, residential street. Just before, Barron expressed her
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intent to find an underground prayer space to a local shopkeeper, to which the shopkeeper responded: “Good luck finding one of those.” The need is evident. Although it is estimated that the public mosque can accommodate just 300 men and 50 women at a time, and even with concerns voiced by members of the Greek Orthodox and Muslim communities over certain concessions, Elsa Barron sees the opening of the mosque as a critical step forward. Barriers may still exist, but Barron suggests that, with the right leadership, a mosque in Athens might pave the way for fruitful religious dialogue in a city that has long been monoreligious, affording Greek leaders and citizens alike the means to understand Islam in a modern context, and the chance to turn painful historic memories into peaceful partnerships for the future.
DISCOVERING CHESTERTON IN LONDON Brady Stiller '20 Theology and Biology
For Notre Dame class of 2020 valedictorian Brady Stiller, his fall break travel and research grant from the Nanovic Institute built on relationships he had fortuitously established with archival trustees and stakeholders at the London Global Gateway. Stiller’s senior theology thesis, “Vocation as Story— A vocational reading of G.K. Chesterton,” sought to investigate the ways the work of the famed writer illuminates questions about free will and the human condition today. While Stiller had already completed an impressive amount of preliminary research during his study abroad in London in the fall of 2018, he knew there was more to Chesterton’s story for him to uncover. While Stiller was able to glean insight into Chesterton’s idea of “vocation as story” from his published works, he knew that archival collections would deepen his analysis. “Visiting archival collections of original notebooks, newspaper clippings, and artworks filled in the gaps of my understanding of Chesterton,” said Stiller. “And his unpublished life also offered a window into the mind and daily life of Chesterton, whose vocational worldview I could see in action in his personal notebooks and original works of art.” When he was first in London, Stiller was able to meet Aidan Mackey, one of the foremost Chesterton experts and the man who independently organized the archive now held at the Global Gateway. He credits this connection and his relationships with professors and other Chesterton enthusiasts at the Global Gateway with allowing him to access the archive in Trafalgar Square before it was open to the public. After completing his weeklong research, Stiller was more than pleased with the results of his time in London. Working with manuscripts, he learned how surprising discoveries appear in unexpected places. “Some surprises . . . useful for my thesis are what I found in studying his notebooks and toy theater,” said Stiller. “His notebooks
are a window into his imaginative mind, which was always thinking up a line for a poem, a scene of a play, a prayer of gratitude to God, or an image to doodle.” Fr. Jim Lies, C.S.C., faculty member and director of Catholic initiatives and outreach at the London Global Gateway, says “Brady’s curiosity, faith, intellect, and interest in research delighted the London faculty. “Our efforts at the London Global Gateway to pursue the Chesterton Collection were much rewarded when we learned that Stiller, the first person to explore the wonders of our newly acquired archive—even before it had been shelved—was selected as the 2020 valedictorian,” says Fr. Lies. “The Nanovic Institute’s creative and generous ways of supporting our students’ travel and research is widely known; we see the fruit of it in all kinds of ways in London. Brady’s research visit was among them and only possible because of the Institute’s generosity. We’re all so proud of his good work.” Stiller, who graduated in May, is considering going to seminary in his home state of Louisiana. But he added that, no matter what he does, his work with Chesterton isn’t done—thanks to his Nanovicsupported research: “To have done this type of archival research with these particular collections so early in my academic career gives me hope that I might one day continue researching Chesterton.”
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Transform Graduate Students Anna Vincenzi, Ph.D. Department of History Nanovic Graduate Fellow
Throughout her career as a graduate student, Anna Vincenzi’s research and experience at Notre Dame was enriched by the Nanovic Institute. Vincenzi, who was conferred with her Ph.D. in history this May, specializes in the “Age of Revolution” (1765-1848), a time marked by citizen upheaval in Europe, not dissimilar to the current sociopolitical climate. In the spring of 2016, during her second year of doctoral study with the Department of History, Vincenzi was awarded a graduate professional development grant to attend the British and Irish Associations for American Studies annual conference at the Queen’s University in Belfast to present, “The American Revolutions of Venice, Florence, and Rome: Views from the Italian Gazettes, 17651791.” Vincenzi was awarded two more graduate professional development grants the following year to give presentations: one at the Consortium of the Revolutionary Era at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, the other at the Age of Revolutions Conference hosted by Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway. In 2018, she received a fourth grant to participate in the Global Dome Ph.D. Accelerator Program in the United Kingdom, organized by Nanovic faculty fellows Patrick Griffin and Elliot Visconsi in collaboration with faculty from the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Heidelberg. “As I approached the defense of my dissertation proposal, and as I attempted to define the scope of
my research and the questions that my dissertation would answer, opportunities to network and learn from other scholars through dialogue were extremely fruitful,” says Vincenzi. With financial support from a Nanovic Institute summer travel and research grant, Vincenzi spent two weeks conducting research in Florence, Modena, and Milan during June 2018. In Florence, she carried out research at the State Archive, where she focused on sources pertaining to the Tuscan Grand Duke Peter Leopold’s reforms and most specifically his constitutional project. Vincenzi also visited the National Library, the Marucelliana Library, and the Oblate Library, where she accessed and made digital reproductions of a great number of Tuscan and nonTuscan periodicals. “This grant allowed me to make essential progress toward the completion of two of my dissertation chapters—a chapter focusing on Florentine reactions to the American Revolution, and a chapter looking at how interpretations of the American Revolution evolved and changed during the 1790s and after the French Revolution broke out,” says Vincenzi. The digital journal reproductions served as the basis for the last of her dissertation chapters. With plans to submit a book proposal to a publisher in the near future, Vincenzi believes her Nanovic-funded professional development grants have poised her to find success as she begins applications for academic jobs.
“I want to thank the Nanovic Institute for supporting my research and allowing me to make essential progress toward the completion of my dissertation.” 36
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“The Nanovic Institute provides Notre Dame students with a European home away from home and affords us so many opportunities to reach our academic and personal potential.” Clare O’Hare Doctoral Candidate, Notre Dame Law School Nanovic Graduate Fellow
When I applied to join the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, I underestimated how much it would contribute to my research and enrich my Notre Dame experience. Thanks to a travel and research grant I conducted preliminary in-country research in Paris and London. This research now forms the basis of my dissertation on commercial courts in Europe. This research spans law, history, political science, and economics—and the Nanovic Institute affords me the opportunity to interact with leading scholars across these fields in ways that just aren’t possible within individual departments. The support I found at Nanovic goes far beyond financial. As a graduate fellow I now have an incredible community, who are now friends as well as colleagues. While we come from a variety of departments on campus, three different continents and five countries, we share a deep interest in all things European and are all committed to high-quality research and teaching. Our biweekly meetings were warm affairs, and we used the time to share our research and to develop a new undergraduate interdisciplinary seminar called “Contesting Europe.” For many of us, it was our first time co-teaching, and for some, it was the first time developing a new syllabus. For all of us, it was
a chance to develop new teaching, leadership and mentorship skills when we launched the course in January 2020. Having this group to lean on has been even more important as we moved the course online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are sharing resources on how to deliver online teaching successfully and in place of our usual coffee and treats in the Institute, we are sharing our favorite recipes now that our meetings have also gone virtual! Finally, the Nanovic Institute provides the graduate fellows with the opportunity to engage with a broader audience. We all hope that our scholarship can contribute positively to the world. During these strange times the Institute is encouraging the graduate fellows to contribute short pieces that connect with the COVID-19 pandemic from a European perspective. COVID-19 is undoubtedly the biggest threat to integral human development that I have seen in my lifetime and I am grateful that the Institute is confident that we, the graduate fellows, can contribute to the emerging conversation. But most especially, I am grateful for the people who make the work of the Institute possible, for providing Notre Dame students with a European home away from home and for affording us so many opportunities to reach our academic and personal potential.
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Kevin Richardson ’20 Master of Global Affairs Keough School of Global Affairs
Kevin Richardson, a recent graduate of the Master of Global Affairs program, used his academic year travel and research grant from the Nanovic Institute to return to Ukraine, a place he had grown to love as a Peace Corps volunteer. To complete his thesis, Richardson needed to answer his central question: to what extent did the 2012 Ukrainian language law consolidate Ukrainian identity? While in Ukraine, Richardson interviewed community leaders, academics, and journalists, including leading researchers at Ukrainian Catholic University about the ever-evolving relationship between language and belonging in the country. Richardson was interested in a shift from an ethnic to a more civic definition of Ukrainian identity in the past decade and further sought to understand how Ukrainian identity varies from region to region, especially in regions where Ukrainian is not the primary spoken language. Having developed the language skills needed to undertake this project from his previous two years in the country, Richardson was uniquely poised to complete this research. “There is arguably no more important issue in Europe today than the construction of a Ukrainian identity that will satisfy the desires of both the Ukrainian and Russian-speaking populations,” says A. James McAdams, William M. Scholl Professor of International Affairs and director of the Nanovic Institute from 2002 to 2018. McAdams served as a faculty advisor for Richardson’s Nanovic grant proposal and graduate thesis. “I was particularly impressed with Kevin’s success in capturing the nuances and challenges of this undertaking through both primary research and interviews in Ukraine.” Richardson walked away from his 25-day research trip with numerous insights into the role of language in 38
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Ukraine. He found that “Ukrainians do not directly link language to their identity—language has been and continues to be used as a political tool to purposely incite division and frictions between regions and ethnicities of Ukraine. I also found that while there has been a shift towards a more civic understanding of Ukrainian identity and citizenship, it’s not as strong as I had initially thought.” When asked about the importance of physically being in Ukraine to conduct this research, Richardson said that his main task was finding out how actual people felt about the language law. From his interviews in Ukraine, Richardson arrived at his biggest insight, which altered his thesis’s direction. “No one really knew much about the 2012 law. When asked about it, the only common answer was that it was ‘bad,’ but they didn’t recall what exactly it did or why they thought it was particularly bad.” In addition to a successful research experience, Richardson also felt his time in Ukraine opened doors for his future. “Many thought my perspective and research could help in their own fields of work and even suggested that I find a job working in Ukraine after I graduate,” he said. “This confidence in and affirmation of my work has further motivated me to write a quality thesis, as well as opened up my mind to the prospect of working in Ukraine. Having discovered many areas that need further research in Ukraine also put the idea of potentially seeking a Ph.D. in my mind in order to pursue a better understanding and fill some of those gaps.” Richardson added that this research trip exceeded any expectations he had, and he is incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity.
“The first day I walked into the Nanovic Institute was the day that marked a shift in my experience at Notre Dame. Since then, Nanovic has always been welcoming and supportive. I wouldn’t have been able to graduate the way I have without the Institute.”
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Resilience
Europe 2020 Clemens Sedmak Interim Director, Nanovic Institute for European Studies
Europe 2020. There are things we know and things we could have known, things we guessed and things we could have never guessed. 25 years ago, Portuguese author and Nobel laureate José Saramago published his novel Ensaio sobre a cegueira (Blindness); he described a mysterious mass epidemic leading to loss of eyesight, a scenario of contagious blindness. Three years later Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as an author “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.” Indeed, the realities that we encountered in spring 2020 in Europe were “elusory” to some extent—we could not fully grasp them. Europe 2020. Some things could finally be planned and happened: On January 31, Europe watched an unprecedented event—the official “Brexit.” Lord Alton of Liverpool, who is set to serve as our next Nanovic Forum speaker in 2021, published an essay a few days before the official Brexit where he reflected on the gaps in British society and the need to build inclusivity: “The ‘social market’—moral capitalism—remains our best hope, but it needs inspired and ethical leadership and to be rooted in personal values that do not feed on greed, selfishness, and the survival of the fiercest. It needs to seek justice and fairness for the poorest. When we lose sight of that basic truth, the gaps in society widen into chasms.” The challenge of preventing gaps from widening into chasms has been made more visible by the global health crisis, which although we could not foresee is forever changing our vista. Professor Kjell Espmark delivered the Presentation Speech for the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature at the Stockholm Concert Hall—he described Saramago’s works and suggested: “Your distinguishing mark is irony coupled with discerning empathy, distance without distance.” Indeed, these terms— “distance without distance” and “discerning empathy,” even “irony”—have gained new meaning in Europe in 2020. Saramago, in his speech at the Nobel Banquet, remembered the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and made it a point to talk about the duty of citizens: “Let us common citizens therefore speak up. With the same vehemence as when we demanded our rights, let us demand responsibility over our duties. Perhaps the world could turn a little better.” Europe 2020—time for accepting responsibility based on solidarity. There are so many possibilities: Paolo Mazzara ’23, for example, a Notre Dame undergraduate student from Italy has been helping Italian healthcare workers in Lombardy with translations, offering his language skills to help secure crucial personal protective equipment through interactions with global agencies like the WHO. As we conclude this exercise of looking back, may we more clearly see those around us (1 John 4:20). Like Simone Weil, the French philosopher, reasoned, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, ‘What are you going through?’”
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