The Dignity of Human Life in the Digital Age is presented by Paolo Carozza, professor of law, Notre Dame Law School as part of the Dean’s Speakers Series. Paolo Carozza joined the Notre Dame Law School faculty in 1996. His expertise is in the areas of comparative constitutional law, human rights, law and development, and international law. From 2012-22 he served as the director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, an interdisciplinary, university-wide institute focusing primarily on the themes of democracy and human development, where he was also the principal investigator of the Notre Dame Constitutionalism and Rule of Law Lab (CAROLL). Professor Carozza is also a Faculty Fellow of the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, the Institute for Educational Initiatives, the Pulte Institute for Global Development, and the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Initiative. Carozza currently serves as a member of the Oversight Board, an independent expert body created by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to render binding decisions and policy recommendations regarding difficult content moderation questions on Meta’s platforms.  

As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute’s spring 2025 speaker series, Anelise Hanson Shrout will deliver a talk on her new book, Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy (NYU Press, 2024). Book sales will follow the talk. Book DescriptionFamine brought ruin to the Irish countryside in the 19th century. In response, people around the world and from myriad social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds became involved in Irish famine relief. They included enslaved Black people in Virginia, poor tenant farmers in rural New York, and members of the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, as well as plantation owners in the US south, abolitionists in Pennsylvania, and, politicians in England and Ireland. Most of these people had no personal connection to Ireland. For many, the famine was their first time participating in distant philanthropy.Aiding Ireland  investigates the Irish famine as a foundational moment for normalizing international giving. Anelise Hanson Shrout argues that these diverse men and women found famine relief to be politically useful. Shrout takes readers from Ireland to Britain, across the Atlantic to the United States, and across the Mississippi to Indian Territory, uncovering what was to be gained for each group by participating in global famine relief. Aiding Ireland demonstrates that international philanthropy and aid are never simple, and are always intertwined with politics both at home and abroad. Speaker Biography Anelise Hanson Shrout is assistant professor in the Program in Digital and Computational Studies at Bates College, where she is also affiliated with the Department of History and the Program in American Studies. Her work explores the intertwined relationships between history, computation, algorithmic thinking and data. Her research focuses on the nineteenth-century origins of international humanitarianism, and particularly the ways in which philanthropic donations were used as proxies for arguments about governance in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. She is also working on a digital archiving project that explores the lives of immigrants who were medically incarcerated in New York in the nineteenth century. This project uses computational methods to understand the forces working on those immigrants, as well as the communities they were able to form within institutions. Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.

Join the Institute for Social Concerns on Friday afternoons for Encounter: lectures by distinguished scholars in the field of Catholic social teaching, who will share their insights and provide critical conversation on matters of justice and the common good. Reception to follow. Anna Rowlands is the St. Hilda Chair in Catholic Social Thought and Practice at Durham University, England. She is a political theologian who works at the interface of political and social theory and Christian theology. Her original training was in the social and political sciences, followed by postgraduate degrees in theology. She has worked for two decades on the political philosophy of Gillian Rose, with additional interests in Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. These interests coincided with research over the last 15 years in two other areas: the study of forced migration and the ethics of migration, and the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. She has published in all these areas. Her key publications include: Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times (Bloomsbury, 2021) and The T&T Clark Reader in Political Theology, edited with Elizabeth Phillips and Amy Daughton (Bloomsbury, 2021) and The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Contemporary Migration (forthcoming 2024) edited with Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh. She is currently working on a new book on Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil and Gillian Rose.

Following the success of her last film, Bodies Bodies Bodies, writer/director Halina Reijn said she was inspired to make a film like 9½ Weeks but from the female's perspective. The spirit of 1980s and 1990s erotic thrillers with an updated sensibility and humanity comes through in Babygirl, which won numerous accolades including Best Actress for Nicole Kidman at the Venice Film Festival. The film follows a high-powered CEO (Kidman) of an empty-box business who puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much-younger intern. GET TICKETS  

MOMIX propels you down the rabbit hole in Artistic Director Moses Pendleton's Lewis Carroll-inspired creation, Alice. The company enchanted DPAC audiences in 2013 and 2016 with the incredible physicality of its dancers, who seamlessly blend illusion, acrobatics, magic, and mystery. "I don't intend to retell the whole Alice story," Pendleton says, "but use it as a taking off point for invention." GET TICKETS  

Dido and Aeneas, the seminal opera in a prologue and three acts by English Baroque composer Henry Purcell with a libretto by Nahum Tate (based on Virgil’s Aeneid), is given a fresh update in OperaND’s spring production. This event is free and open to the public.  Originally published at music.nd.edu.