Work-in-Progress Seminars are designed to generate in-depth discussion of new scholarly work. For the pre-circulated paper and to attend, please register with the link below. Room location information will be shared with preparation materials following your registration.   During his Kellogg visiting fellowship, Fernando Ojesto Martínez Manzur will work on his project, “How to (Un)Build a Democracy: The Mexican Case,” which explores the challenges of building a democratic system and the ease with which it can be dismantled. Democracy worldwide, particularly in Latin America, is under attack. The Mexican experience will be the basis of this research, especially because it is a great example of how an electoral democracy was built; but unfortunately, it also serves as an ongoing example of how democracy can be “unbuilt” or dismantled. The project is divided into two main sections. The first section will analyze how a democracy is built, focusing on the democratic transition that Mexico underwent from 1977 to 2018. This section will outline the necessary and foundational requirements for building a democracy. The second part of the research will examine the current state of democracy in Mexico and how a 40-year democratic process has been disrupted in the past six years. Since 2018, democracy and its institutions have faced a constant threat, orchestrated by the government and its ruling party. This threat, rooted in the concept of political majorities, has escalated into a reality following the 2024 election, where the governing party secured almost complete control, including a supermajority in Congress, granting them the power to amend the Constitution. This part of the research will aim to understand the dismantling process Mexican democracy is undergoing. Register Here

The Keough-Naughton Institute invites you to a conversation on literary biography with Professor Frank Shovlin, University of Liverpool, and Professor Brian Ó Conchubhair, University of Notre Dame. Shovlin and Ó Conchubhair will discuss their respective work on the biographies of writers John McGahern and Flann O'Brien, the research and creative processes involved in biography writing, and resonances between writers' lived worlds and the worlds they bring to life on the page. The conversation will be moderated by Gráinne McEvoy, assistant director of research programs at KNI. Speaker BiographiesBrian Ó Conchubhair is a professor of Irish language and literature at the University of Notre Dame and currently serving as interim chair of the Department of Irish Language and Literature. His research focuses on cultural nationalism; Irish-language fiction; the European fin de siècle; and modernism. He is currently editing a collection of Flann O'Brien Irish-language essays and articles. Recent publications include a co-edited (with Philip O'Leary) a special issue of Éire-Ireland on the contemporary Irish-language short story, and an article on Brendan Behan in Litteraria Pragensia. Forthcoming articles will appear in Cambridge History of the Irish Novel; The Cambridge History of Irish Poetry; and The Revival in Irish Literature and Culture.    Frank Shovlin is a native of the west of Ireland who was educated at the Universities of Galway and Oxford before taking up a position at the University of Liverpool where he is now professor of Irish literature in English. He has published a wide range of books, chapters and articles on a range of subjects revolving around the development of literature in 20th-century Ireland, with his most recent book The Letters of John McGahern winning widespread critical acclaim. He is currently the M. H. Abrams Visiting Research Fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina where he is completing his authorized biography of John McGahern.   Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.

Rachel SchwartzKellogg Visiting Fellow Amid increasing global concern with corruption, policymakers and civil society organizations have urged the adoption of international anti-corruption commissions (IACCs) to assist in strengthening the rule of law where politicians lack the will and capacity to crack down on corruption themselves. Under what conditions are IACCs granted the autonomy to investigate and prosecute corruption, and when do domestic elites succeed in constraining their authority and capacity? Drawing on comparative analysis of IACCs in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, this lecture will unpack the domestic and transnational determinants of IACC design, offering policy insights on the possibilities and limits of international support for strengthening the rule of law in fragile contexts.   Click here for more information

The Keough-Naughton Institute and the Department of Irish Language and Literature invite you to a talk by visiting speaker Davis Sandefur. Lecture Abstract Sa gcaint seo, pléifidh mé an aistear a bhí agam le Gaeilge, ag tosaí ag Ollscoil Notre Dame (’14) agus ag críochnú agus mé i m’Oifigeach Pleanála Teanga in Inis Oírr, Árainn. Pléifear polasaí Rialtas na hÉireann i leith na Gaeilge (Plean 20 Bliain, Acht na Gaeltachta 2012) chomh maith le coincheap na pleanála teanga. Beidh béim ar leith ar an teanga agus ar an bpleanáil teanga in Inis Oírr. In this talk, Sandefur will share his journey with Irish, starting at the University of Notre Dame (class of 2014) and culminating with working as the Oifigeach Pleanála Teanga (Language Planning Officer) on Inis Oírr, in the Aran Islands. The government’s Irish language policy (20 year plan, Gaeltacht Act 2012) as well as the concept of language planning will be discussed. Specific focus will be given to the status of the language and language planning on Inis Oírr. Speaker Biography Originally from Beaver Dam, Kentucky, Davis Sandefur started learning Irish at the University of Notre Dame (class of 2014). After a period working as a secondary school teacher, he moved to Ireland in 2021 to pursue further education. He then spent two years working with Fiontar agus Scoil na Gaeilge at Dublin City University, between research and teaching. He’s been working as the Oifigeach Pleanála Teanga on Inis Oírr since 2024.     Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.

Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” will speak at the University in an event hosted by the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights. Drawing on his work as a journalist, Blitzer will discuss how immigration became a political crisis. “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis” is an epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported book about the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border. Blitzer tells this history through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate. The book has received widespread praise and was named one of the best books of 2024 by the New York Times and several other publications. The event is free and open to the public. A reception with book sales and a book signing will follow the lecture. Blitzer’s lecture ties in with the Klau Institute’s Migration Initiative, which launched last year through collaboration with other experts from across the Keough School of Global Affairs and the University as a whole. This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Latino Studies, the Institute for Social Concerns, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy. Originally published at klau.nd.edu.

In this talk, Cheryl Lawther, professor at Notre Dame’s School of Law and a fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, will draw on her recently published book, Constructing Victimhood: Beyond Innocence and Guilt in Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press, 2024), to expand the criminological, victimological, and transitional justice image of who we “see” as victims, what we “hear” as experiences of victimization, and who makes these determinations. In her talk, Lawther will argue that if transitional justice is to live up to its claims of being “victim-centered,” it is essential to widen its conceptual and practical boundaries to recognize the multiple and overlapping variables that construct and reproduce victimhood. Lawther will be joined by Josefina Echavarría Álvarez, professor of the practice and director of the Peace Accords Matrix, Joachim Ozonze (PhD candidate in Peace Studies and Theology) and Emma Murphy (Post-Doctoral researcher, Kroc Institute & Keough-Naughton Institute). Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Professor Silvana Patriarca (Fordham University) titled:"Anticolonialism(s) as antiracism(s)?" Italian Radicals Facing 'Race' and the Colonial Question at the Turn of the Twentieth Century In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Italians fully participated in the racialization of the African populations that they and other Europeans colonized. At the same time, Italians themselves were often racialized by other Europeans (including Americans) and engaged in the racialization of southern Italians. In this context, some anthropologists and sociologists of leftist orientation such as Napoleone Colajanni questioned the idea of “pure races” and the racial hierarchies that placed Nordic peoples (including northern Italians) above southern Europeans. A number of leftist and radical thinkers and politicians — radical democrats, socialists, and anarchists — also rejected colonialism and especially the consequences that colonial wars had for the inhabitants of a country like Italy that was still poor and underdeveloped. Some anarchist geographers even claimed a right to so-called “barbarity.” To what extent did the critique of colonialism (including the internal variety) lead to an explicit rejection of anti-Black racism? Were anticolonial thinkers able to express sympathy and solidarity with the colonized people victimized by European aggressions? Analyzing the works of the thinkers and the leftist press of that period, this lecture will address these questions as part of a larger project on the history of antiracist beliefs and sensibilities in modern Italian culture. Silvana Patriarca received her laurea at the University of Turin and her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She has taught at Columbia University and the University of Florida, and is currently a professor in the Department of History of Fordham University. She specializes in the history of modern Italy and her research has ranged from the social history of industrialization to the intellectual and political history of statistics to the cultural history of nationalism and the construction of national identities in their intersection with gender and “race.” The author of the award-winning Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press) and of Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge University Press), she has co-edited (with Lucy Riall) The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan). She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center (North Carolina) and at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, and visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) in Paris. Her most recent book, Race in Post-Fascist Italy: "War Children" and the Color of the Nation (2022), focuses on the experiences and representations of the "brown babies" born at the end of World War Two from the encounters between Black Allied soldiers and Italian women, and explores the persistence of racial thinking and racism in post-fascist and postcolonial Italy. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.

Wrestling with the fallout of the war in Gaza on Jewish identity, political commentator Peter Beinart shares his personal reckoning with the moral reconstruction needed to build a future "that recognizes the infinite value of all human life." Atalia Omer, professor of religion, conflict and peace studies, will moderate. A frequent contributor to The New York Times and an MSNBC analyst, Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. He is also the editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter. Note: Bags and backpacks will not be allowed inside the venue. A storage space will be provided on site. Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

The Kroc Institute has selected The Honorable Emilce Cuda as the featured speaker for the 26th Annual Dialogues on Nonviolence, Religion, and Peace. As Secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America at the Holy See, Cuda is a renowned international speaker who has published extensively on moral social theology, democracy and Catholicism in liberal contexts, theology of the people and culture in a Latin American context, economic migration, the socio-environmental ecological crisis, and more. Cuda is a member of the research team, “The future work of labor after Laudato si,” at the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) and the Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC). She received a Ph.D. in theology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina and specializes in social moral theology. Lunch and conversation will follow this lecture in C103, Hesburgh Center for International Studies. The Dialogues on Nonviolence, Religion, and Peace, which began in 1999, were established through a gift to the Kroc Institute from Mrs. Anne Marie Yoder and her family. Each year, the Kroc Institute invites a leading thinker, writer, scholar, and/or peace advocate to deliver a lecture related to nonviolence, religion, and peace. Following the lecture, audience members join in informal dialogue and discussion with the speaker and with each other. Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

This Notre Dame Forum event is co-sponsored by the Office of the President and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, part of the University’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Featuring Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor, Harvard University; Director, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation Professor Allen is a renowned professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy. She is also a seasoned nonprofit leader, democracy advocate, tech ethicist, distinguished author, and mom. Allen's work to make the world better for young people has taken her from teaching college and leading a $60 million university division to driving change at the helm of a $6 billion foundation, writing as a national opinion columnist, and advocating for strong public health policy, democracy renovation, civic education, and sound governance of and with new technology. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, her leadership in rallying coalitions and building solutions resulted in the country’s first-ever Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience; her policies were adopted in federal legislation and a presidential executive order. She was the 2020 winner of the Library of Congress' Kluge Prize, which recognizes scholarly achievement in the disciplines not covered by the Nobel Prize. She received the Prize "for her internationally recognized scholarship in political theory and her commitment to improving democratic practice and civics education." She was a lead author on the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, a framework for securing excellence in history and civic education for all learners, K-12, released in 2021. The annual Hesburgh Lecture in Ethics and Public Policy, established by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in 1995, honors the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., president emeritus of Notre Dame, a global champion of peace and justice, and the founder of the Kroc Institute. Each year a distinguished scholar, policymaker, and/or peace advocate is invited by the Kroc Institute director to deliver a major lecture on an issue related to ethics and public policy in the context of peace and justice. Originally published at forum2024.nd.edu.

As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's fall 2024 speaker series, Professor Peter Shirlow will deliver a lecture titled “The Failings of Irish Republicans and the National Question in Ireland.” Lecture Abstract This lecture will explore how, despite post-Brexit Referendum predictions of a united Ireland by as early as 2021, there has been, at best, limited growth in recorded support for ending partition between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Growth of Northern Ireland’s Catholic population has been less dramatic than predicted and the region now has the fastest growing economy in the UK. Peter Shirlow asserts that in this context, pro-united Ireland campaigns and republican activism, especially via civic fora and social media, have failed to significantly close the gap between Irish unity and pro-union proponents. In this lecture, Shirlow will consider how Irish Republican arguments for unity contain internal contractions: underscoring the economic successes of the South while also indicating its structural deficiencies, or pointing to socio-economic deficiencies of Northern Ireland even while Republicans are co-authors of its new found economic growth. Ultimately, Shirlow argues, the shortcomings of Irish republicanism lie in its inability to read and understand the new sociology of Northern Ireland– particularly temporal and social shifts that potentially render the inevitability thesis of Irish unification inconsistent, if not ineffective, in the short to medium term. Speaker Biography Professor Peter Shirlow (FaCSS) is the director at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies. He was formerly the deputy director of the Institute for Conflict Transformation and Social Justice, QUB. He is the independent chair of the Executive Office's Employers' Guidance on Recruiting People with Conflict-Related Convictions Working Group and a board member of the mental health charity Threshold. He is a visiting research professor at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. He sits on the editorial boards of Irish Political Studies and International Planning Studies. Professor Shirlow has undertaken conflict transformation work in Northern Ireland and has used that knowledge in exchanges with governments, former combatants and NGOs in the former Yugoslavia, Moldova, Bahrain and Iraq. He has also presented talks to members of the US Senate and House of Representatives and is a regular media contributor. Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.

This event is part of the Kroc Institute’s series on intersectionality and justice as a beneficial framework and methodology paired with peace studies. The series is led by Ashley Bohrer, assistant professor of gender and peace studies, and features a variety of guest presenters who address the potential of intersectional analysis to transform timely global conversations and issues. Since the new millennium, Rwanda has been celebrated as a prosperous country with the highest number of women (61% in 2018) in its Parliament. Yet, President Paul Kagame has been winning Rwandan elections since 2003, and in 2024 was elected to a fourth term with 99.15% vote. Led by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the government has been criticized as an authoritarian state for its repression of political dissidents. Dr. Xianan Jin, lecturer in politics at the University of Exeter, will discuss her book project, "Selective Capital in Women’s Political Participation: Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Rwanda," which investigates the paradox between liberal political inclusion of women and oppressive state control. Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

The Notre Dame Student Peace Conference is an annual conference organized by undergraduate peace studies students at the University of Notre Dame. During this free conference, undergraduate and graduate students from across the U.S. and abroad present original research, showcase innovative practices, and network with peers who share their passion for peace. More information about this year’s conference will be provided in the coming months. Students and faculty who wish to learn more about participating in the upcoming conference can visit the conference program page. Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

The Notre Dame Student Peace Conference is an annual conference organized by undergraduate peace studies students at the University of Notre Dame. During this free conference, undergraduate and graduate students from across the U.S. and abroad present original research, showcase innovative practices, and network with peers who share their passion for peace. More information about this year’s conference will be provided in the coming months. Students and faculty who wish to learn more about participating in the upcoming conference can visit the conference program page. Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.