College of Arts & Letters | Latest News

At a recent University of Notre Dame reunion, Rev. Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C., ’99, reconnected with old friends and shared stories of his life today, highlighting how he builds relationships with students, both in the classroom and as a priest in residence at Stanford Hall. “You’re living the dream,” one of his friends said. Koeth was struck by just how true that statement was. Since he first enco…

The College of Arts & Letters Office of the Dean has appointed several new leaders in the College and across its departments, centers, and institutes. Their terms begin July 1, 2026, unless otherwise noted. College …

Notre Dame faculty are conducting research around the globe year-round. Their research spans continents, connects them with remote parts of the world, and even brings them into war and conflict-torn areas. For some, that’s exactly where they need to be. Notre Dame psychology…

Rev. John I Jenkins C.S.C.(Photo by Barbara Johnston/University of Notre Dame) Commonweal, the oldest independent, lay-led, Catholic journal of opinion in the United States, created the award in 2024 in recognition of the journal’s 100th anniversary. Father Jenkins will be presented with the award, which is given biennially, at the Commonweal Benefit Dinner on Oct. 5 in New York City.

The global health space has the power to connect researchers across disciplines and bring light to the world’s pressing challenges. For Ph.D. students and candidates who are pursuing research in global health, the Eck Institute for Global Health at the University of Notre Dame facilitates this with its Ph.D. Fellowship program.

The University of Notre Dame announced the launch of the Earth and planetary sciences (EPS) minor, a multidisciplinary program designed to prepare students for the rapidly expanding global space sector. A collaboration between the College of Engineering, the…

Virna Vidal-Menezes, a Ph.D. candidate in economics and a fellow in Notre Dame’s Program for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (ND PIER),…

University of Notre Dame rising senior Katharine Steffes has been awarded a Beinecke Scholarship worth $35,000 in support of her graduate education. She is Notre Dame’s 11th Beinecke Scholar overall and third since 2023.

In 1970, nearly half of all Black individuals in the U.S. resided in a large city. Over the past 50 years, that number has fallen to merely 25 percent, while the share living in the suburbs of large cities rose from 16 to 36 percent. This demographic shift is as large as the post-World War II wave of the Great Migration, according to Notre Dame economist Evan Mast, who set out study whether subur…

For students in the Institute for Latino Studies, learning extends far beyond the classroom. This summer, 18 undergraduates will take part in the Cross Cultural Leadership Program (CCLP), an immersive internship experience that places them in Latino communities across the country, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, El Paso, and South Bend. Since its launch in 2005, CCLP has served as …

On Monday (May 25), Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas (Magnificent humanity), which provides moral guidance to bishops, clergy and the faithful on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence (AI). Below, University of Notre Dame faculty experts from the College of Arts and Letters, College of Engineering, Keough School of Global Affairs and L…

Around the turn of the fifth century, Hypatia was a prominent philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician living in the Roman Empire. Today, she’s the figurehead of the Hypatia Scholars Program at the University of Notre Dame. Housed in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, the Hypatia Scholars Program is a yearlong experience that offers first-year science and engineering student…

The University of Notre Dame celebrated its 181st Commencement Ceremony on Sunday (May 17) at Notre Dame Stadium. An audience of more than 20,000 family members, friends, faculty and graduates were in attendance as 2,120 degrees were conferred on undergraduate students.

A team of four University of Notre Dame undergraduate students won the national competition America’s Startup with their pitch for a data security company, alongside nine other teams from universities across the country. America’s Startup…

John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost and Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, has been elected to the Society of American Historians “in recognition…

On Tuesday, May 12, John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost at the University of Notre Dame, announced the winners of the 2026 University…

Notre Dame seniors Gabriela Sierocka and Kate Rafford earned 2026 Library Research Awards in the Capstone or Thesis Research category.

In his four years at the University of Notre Dame, Cade Czarnecki ’26 has majored in political science and economics, studied for a semester each in Washington, D.C., and Greece, served as president of the multi-partisan BridgeND club, earned a spot as an inaugural undergraduate fellow with the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative, and worked as a research operations analyst for the Wilson Sheehan Lab…

Program of Liberal Studies major Quinn McKenna ’23 knows that even the “great books” are built one line, one chapter at a time. The best career advice she got from her professors was to do exactly that: focus on just the next chapter. “If you let your interests and your passion guide this next chapter, everything will unfold as it should,” she said. Since graduating, the south Florida native has …

Grace Leeson wasn’t accustomed to being behind the pack. But here she was in Puebla, Mexico — for a whole semester her junior year — and out of everyone in her cohort, she was the only one who was not either a Spanish major or a native speaker. Most of her classes were entirely in Spanish, she was living with a Spanish-speaking host family, and she’d be shadowing Spanish-speaking doctors. Though …