Four faculty members in the College of Arts & Letters have won National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, extending the University of Notre Dame’s record success with the federal agency committed to supporting original research and scholarship.

Jon Bullock, an assistant professor in the Department of Music; Therese Cory, the John and Jean Oesterle Associate Professor of Thomistic Studies in the Department of Philosophy; Ulrich Lehner, the William K. Warren Foundation Professor in the Department of Theology; and Marisel Moreno, a professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, are among the 78 scholars offered the prestigious fellowships, which were announced Jan. 14.

Notre Dame and Johns Hopkins University were the only institutions to have four faculty win individual NEH fellowships this year, and Notre Dame faculty have won more NEH fellowships than any other private university in the country since 2000. Notre Dame’s success has been driven in large part due to faculty research support provided by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

“I am delighted that the NEH has once again recognized the exceptional research projects our faculty are pursuing,” said Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters. “These four awards underscore the high caliber of diverse scholarship across our disciplines and invaluable guidance offered by ISLA throughout the fellowship application process.”

Connecting Kurdish music, media, and culture

For the past decade, Bullock has been conducting research on Kurdish music and broadcasting, a long-established but underexplored area of global culture.

Kurds are an ethnic group that predominantly span across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria and have faced varying degrees of linguistic, cultural, and political oppression. Because of this history, and because they have no nation-state of their own, Bullock said relatively little research has been done on Kurdish art and media.

In his book project, tentatively titled “Kurdish Broadcasting and the Power of Music on Air,” Bullock hopes to provide a historical overview of Kurdish music on the radio and analyze how its impact on Kurdish society helps scholars of music and media think more deeply about the power of music broadcasting as a whole.

“It’s not just trying to piece together a music history over the last 100 years among the Kurds,” Bullock said. “But also showing that music and media are intertwined and how that can lead to new perspectives on the affordances of music broadcasting, maybe in ways that we haven’t heard before.”

As an ethnomusicologist, Bullock was initially interested in the varying styles of Kurdish music that he describes as a “mosaic of related musical practices.” That led to him discovering the importance of radio broadcasting and understanding where and when the music was shared and what messages were being transmitted, especially during times of geopolitical fluctuation.

Through his work, Bullock hopes to show that the history of Kurdish media can ultimately help to contextualize the present moment of political uncertainty.

An essential part of the project, Bullock said, is centering Kurds in global narratives that shape and define the region.

“This is not just about how we paint a picture of Kurdish music as something unique — it’s about how this helps us to understand how Kurds see themselves in relation to the rest of the world at any given moment,” he said.

Over the past several years, Bullock has completed archival and ethnographic research in Kurdistan, reviewed radio programming and station records, and interviewed former employees who worked for Kurdish radio stations. Now, in his second year at Notre Dame and with support from the NEH, he will be able to complete his project fully.

“It’s been a very long journey of trying to just find things,” he said. “So when I heard I received the fellowship, I was shocked, surprised, and, of course, super grateful.”

Contextualizing Aquinas’ philosophical approach

Cory, who studies medieval philosophy, is currently working on a large project that aims to challenge how scholars consider the mind of the great Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas.

The director of the Jacques Maritain Center and its associated History of Philosophy Forum, Cory focuses her research on mind, self-consciousness, personhood, and the nature of knowing. She is particularly interested in Aquinas’ systematic approach to such topics.

The first portion of her current project is her tentatively titled book “Thinking as Being in Aquinas: Aquinas's Metaphysics of Mind,” which will examine the nature of the mind according to Aquinas. The NEH fellowship will help support a second book and final portion of the project, tentatively titled “Aquinas’ Mind-in-World.” In it, Cory will build off her understanding of Aquinas’ mind and examine how he understands intentionality, or the mind’s ability to enter into relationships with things outside itself.

To do so is intrinsically human, she said, but also something shared with other animals, and Aquinas considered intentionality to be the mind’s way of making itself part of the real world. While watching a football game, for example, a person in the crowd may imagine what it may be like to be a player on the field to better understand the game scenario. In doing so, Aquinas contended, that person also becomes a part of the game.

“We’re part of the world, too — we’re not just spectators,” Cory said. “That’s a really important insight, and it’s something that brings Aquinas closer to non-Western philosophies and Indigenous views that we would often not associate him with at all.”

In her research process, Cory aims to read and understand Aquinas through the historical context in which he lived. She contends that present-day thinkers have often erroneously read Aquinas’ theory of mind through the lens of modern philosophies, whose questions can be very different from his own. In her current project, Cory aims to fundamentally change and correct how scholars interpret his teachings.

“I’m arguing that’s been a huge mistake,” she said. “He really thinks about the mind in a fundamentally different way — he’s not asking those questions. So I’m trying to take the theory off that track and put it on a different track.”

Examining sexualized violence in early modern Catholicism

Lehner, a scholar of religious history and theology of the early modern era, is currently pursuing a project called “Bodies in Court,” which explores how Catholics from 1700 to 1800 confronted marital violence and separation. It highlights the intersections of sexualized violence, power dynamics, legal assessments, and religious values in Catholic regions of central Europe.

Lehner will examine ecclesiastical court records from Austrian, Swiss, German, and Czech archives — areas he is already familiar with from research he did for his previous book, Staged Chastity: Sexual Offenses in the Society of Jesus in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (De Gruyter, 2023), which ultimately led to his current project.

“When I researched the history of sexual abuse among clergymen, I stumbled in the archives upon accounts of marital violence that had been adjudicated before ecclesiastical judges,” he said. “When I decided to read them, I was amazed by how detailed they were. They gave me a glimpse into the intimate lives of people who died centuries ago.”

Lehner was surprised to find accounts of women bravely speaking up about the abuse they suffered and the physical and emotional toll it took on them.

Because sexual violence is a relatively new area of research for historians, Lehner said, there is little known about how Catholics handled this issue. He hopes his project will shed more light on this gap in historical knowledge.

“It will not only provide new insights into the construction of views of body and sexuality, but also analyze the legal and theological background of sexualized violence, thus bringing a new aspect of history to light,” Ulrich wrote in his proposal. “This overlooked area of research promises to overturn many assumptions in standard narratives and contribute to the societal discussion about the abuse of power and its concealment in ecclesiastical contexts.”

Amplifying cultural expression after a disaster

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in Sept. 2017, leaving the U.S. territory reeling from its aftermath that can still be felt today.

The following spring, in partnership with the University of Michigan, Moreno, whose area of expertise is U.S. Latinx literature, and Spanish professor Tom Anderson, led and co-produced an online course and created the multimedia project “Listening to Puerto Rico,” in which they interviewed Puerto Ricans about the immediate impact of the Category 4 hurricane’s destruction.

“As a Puerto Rican born and raised in the archipelago but who has been living stateside for decades, I am one of the millions of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora who witnessed, from afar, the destruction of our homeland,” she said. “There were limited ways to help immediately following the hurricane, but in spring 2018 a unique opportunity arose to create awareness about Puerto Rico and the impact of the storm.”

Deriving inspiration from those interviews, Moreno is now focusing on her NEH-supported project, tentatively titled “Eye of the Storm: Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rican Cultural Production.” The book will focus on Puerto Rican literary and cultural expressions post-Maria, and Moreno said those aspects play a “crucial role by providing a counter-narrative to the dehumanizing rhetoric of the local and federal governments.”

“By examining the representation of the hurricane’s impact in literature and other art forms, I aim to untangle the links between colonialism, anti-Blackness, disaster capitalism, climate change, and migration,” she said. “It has been more than seven years since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, yet much of the archipelago is still experiencing the consequences of the storm — or what I call the ‘afterlives of disaster.’”

Puerto Rican cultural production, Moreno contends in her project, resists the colonial violence that reproduces the afterlives of disaster by being life-affirming and a testament to the survival of the Puerto Rican people.

This project, Moreno said, can also shed light on how cultural creation can uplift resistance to colonial violence and help imagine a decolonial future, especially for communities in the Global South. She also believes this is especially topical as vulnerable communities of color face challenges in light of globalization and climate change.

“I am extremely grateful to everyone who has supported me,” she said. “Winning this fellowship has given me a renewed sense of confidence in this project, which is very close to my heart.”

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on January 22, 2025.