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.

Rev. Msgr. Anthony Onyemuche Ekpo is the undersecretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. He will join the Keough School of Global Affairs during the Nanovic Institute for European Studies' Keeley Vatican Lecture, the latest in this series that seeks to connect the University of Notre Dame with the Vatican. His message, titled "The Reform of the Roman Curia and the Promotion of Integral Human Development," will focus on integral human development, a critical component of Catholic Social Teaching that emphasizes supporting the growth of each person as a holistic human being. This powerful calling inspires the mission of the Keough School of Global Affairs. We invite all students, faculty, staff, and the general public to attend this timely event. Notre Dame President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., will introduce Rev. Msgr. Ekpo.About the Keeley Vatican Lecture series The Keeley Vatican Lecture, facilitated annually by the Nanovic Institute, provides a way to deepen Notre Dame’s connection to the Holy See by bringing distinguished representatives from the Vatican to explore questions surrounding the University’s Catholic mission. Established in 2005 through the generous support of alumnus Terrence R. Keeley ’81, lecturers typically spend several days on campus, joining classes, celebrating Mass with students, and conversing with faculty members. Past Keeley Vatican Lectures have included Sister Raffaella Petrini (secretary-general of the Vatican City State), Rev. Fr. Hans Zollner, Dr. Barbara Jatta, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, and Ukrainian Metropolitan Archbishop Borys Gudziak. Originally published at nanovic.nd.edu.

Nikhit D'SaKellogg Institute Faculty FellowAssistant Professor and Senior Associate Director for Research, Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child There are numerous challenges facing young children in Haiti, including political upheaval, gang violence, civil unrest, community violence, closures, shortages of necessities, and natural disasters. This fragility has had a detrimental impact on their learning and development. To address these multifaceted risk factors D'Sa's team at the University of Notre Dame focused on leveraging the assets of the primary settings — lakay, lekol, legliz (home, school, and parish) — where young children learn and develop daily. Over four years and spread across six of the 10 departments in Haiti, they worked to activate this lakay-lekol-legliz (L3) system through interventions and approaches that were need-based, developed in partnership with communities, iteratively tested and improved, and gradually scaled. In this talk, D'Sa will share lessons from these years of research with faith-based communities, discussing how his team at the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child worked with community partners to activate the L3 system, the evidence and impact of this activation, and lessons for similar initiatives in other conflict-affected and fragile states.   Click here for more information 

Register here The nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to influence national defense and security policy at the height of the Cold War. Today, the world is threatened by a new global arms race as the United States, Russia, China, and other nuclear weapons states are rebuilding and enhancing their arsenals, including new missile deployments. In the face of worsening nuclear dangers, grassroots movements are once again advocating for nuclear disarmament and justice. This webinar will discuss the efforts and impact of local government officials, religious leaders, and international networks to amplify concerns about national nuclear policies and their economic, environmental, health, and cultural consequences. It will also examine the prospects for launching a new global nuclear freeze movement. Featuring:Hirokazu Miyazaki, the Kay Davis Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern UniversityDavid Cortright, professor emeritus of the practice, Kroc Institute for International Peace StudiesThis event is cosponsored by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Catholic Peacebuilding Network, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown University, the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California, and the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America. Register here   Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

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.