The Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good, formerly the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, continues its support of innovative research in the College of Arts & Letters with a new name and expanded mission. Seventeen faculty members in the College will receive support during the 2025-26 academic year through two recently developed funding programs: the Franco Humanities Fellowships and the Research Innovation Collaboratives.

Humanities Fellows

The Franco Institute and the University of Notre Dame College of Arts & Letters have selected the inaugural cohort of Franco Humanities Fellows for the upcoming academic year. Such fellowships allow these faculty to devote full-time effort to research and writing while providing a forum for sharing and discussing their in-progress work. Each fellow receives service and teaching releases for one semester as well as funding for research, travel, and external manuscript reviewers. Franco Institute staff will also assist in supporting external funding opportunities.

This year’s faculty fellows were selected by an interdisciplinary jury of peers and come from a wide range of disciplines within the College of Arts & Letters:

• Christopher Abram, professor of English and fellow of the Medieval Institute, is the Decrane Humanities Fellow with his book project Inventing Beowulf: Innovation and Tradition in the Post-Medieval Poem. The work aims to produce the first comprehensive, critical history of how the most famous Old English poem became a cultural phenomenon in the modern period, and how its changing status across the 19th through 21st centuries has materially affected the form and substance of the text.
• Liang Cai, associate professor of history, is the Lee Humanities Fellow. Her work in progress explores convict politics in the early Chinese empires, arguing that such convict politics emerged because the mutual responsibility system and high-performance-oriented law extensively criminalized people, including the innocent. Paradoxically, the Western Han dynasty’s stringent criminalization of individuals was juxtaposed with redemption policies and frequent amnesties that excessively exonerated offenders, even the most heinous. The intellectual roots underpinning the harsh laws and the universal amnesties fundamentally embraced the same philosophy of a crime-free utopia. Although this dual practice of extensive criminalization and widespread pardoning fostered the population’s tolerance towards the political system, these practices were fraught with injustice and led to form a deeply rooted Chinese tradition marked by skepticism towards the law.
• Alex Chávez, associate professor of anthropology and fellow in the Institute for Latino Studies and the Initiative on Race and Resilience, is this year’s Linehan Humanities Fellow. Chávez is in the midst of writing Sound City: Place, Poiesis, Xicago, which situates how sound is enacted within and upon Latinx communities in Chicago through various sonic registers. By drawing on analyses of political discourse, neighborhood soundscapes, vinyl records, youth radio, outdoor festivals, and literary representations of Chicago, the book will document how Latinx communities identify as residents within the city’s public sphere.
• Debra Javeline, professor of political science and Murphy Humanities Fellow, is completing her latest work Merit and My Kid, a parent-child blended disability life narrative and an insider account of special needs education in U.S. schools. Focusing on family and school dynamics and “invisible” disabilities, the book chronicles the journey from noticing a child’s differences to diagnoses, therapies, school accommodations and services, and sometimes fights for greater support. The book aims to generate a greater public conversation about learning disabilities and to inspire new thinking about societal criteria for merit, as well as policy change with much-needed updating of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
• Brian Krostenko, associate professor of classics, is the Midili Humanities Fellow and is working on providing insight into the ordinary lives of second-century B.C. non-Romans living in Roman culture. In his project Poetry and Social Class in 2^nd c. Roman Italy: The Dedication of the Faliscan Cooks and Other Poems, Krostenko reconstructs the significance of a dedication by a guild of cooks (CIL 1.2 364) by applying a highly multidisciplinary approach to the text by drawing on approaches from literary analysis, social anthropology, sociology, and sociolinguistics. The project aims to illuminate dark areas in the history of Roman culture and Latin poetics, identity formation among marginal groups in Roman Italy, and recover long-lost, muffled voices.
• Ann Mische, associate professor of sociology and peace studies, will be the Sheedy Humanities Fellow. Her project, Futures in Contention: Public Scenarios and Transformative Politics in the Global Arena, draws on more than 240 scenario reports, participant interviews, network analysis, and case studies. For her project, she aims to ask why scenario methodologies have emerged transnationally as a tool for public deliberation, and what effects — intended and unintended — are these techniques having on debates and interventions in response to critical global problems? Mische’s research bridges the humanities and the social sciences by examining intentional efforts to reimagine collective futures as forms of social intervention.
• Michael Rea, the Rev. John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy, is the Hesburgh Women of Impact Humanities Fellow with his project Love, Beauty, and Objectification. The book will contribute to the burgeoning field of “analytic social metaphysics” and focuses on the three important aspects of human life and experience, which have also been theorized in recent feminist scholarship. Nobody has yet examined the ways in which love, beauty, and objectification might all be intertwined with one another, such that love and objectification might both be grounded in beauty, and, by virtue of the way in which this works, love itself might sometimes be objectifying, and therefore harmful under certain conditions.

“Welcoming our first cohort of Humanities Fellows marks a great moment for the newly launched Franco Institute,” said Kate Marshall, associate dean for research and strategic initiatives and director of the Franco Institute. “By supporting scholars in the College with time and intellectual community, we are advancing our mission to support exciting new research with the breadth of our resources.”

Research Innovation Collaboratives

In addition to the humanities fellows, the Franco Institute has selected its second group of Research Innovation Labs following on the previous year’s pilot of these interdisciplinary collaboratives. These “labs” build on the University’s strategic framework by encouraging research outside of departmental and institutional confines in order to radically reimagine how this work informs, influences, and inspires innovative scholarship. Each collaborative will consist of a group of scholars pursuing a core question or a small set of closely related questions. Collaboratives will foster research, teaching, and outreach, deepening connections across disciplines and bringing the insights of the liberal arts to public life.

The labs will take two forms — the Humanities Research Labs and Strategic Theme Labs. There will be two Humanities Collaboratives for 2025-26, each asking timely and enduring questions pertaining to humanities scholarship and the liberal arts:

• Vanesa Miseres, associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Vania Smith-Oka, professor of anthropology and director of the Program in Health, Humanities, & Society, will identify the multifaceted role of art in empowering migrant Latina mothers in South Bend to articulate their experiences of motherhood, migration, and resilience.
• Clíona Ní Ríordáin, the Thomas J. and Kathleen M. O’Donnell Chair in Irish Language and Literature, and Johannes Göransson, Professor of English and Creative Writing, aim to elevate the University’s position to become a leader and beacon in the field of translation studies. Their project will marshal existing strengths and mobilize faculty talent and interest through an engaging and intellectually stimulating project that builds on traditional activities such as textual translation while also engaging in collaborations with the sociology of culture and intermedial translation.

For 2025-26, three Strategic Theme Collaboratives aim to address the University’s campus-wide strategic themes focusing on poverty, democracy, and ethics:

• Molly Copeland, assistant professor of sociology, and Ryan Carpenter, assistant professor of psychology, will take an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the dynamic interplay of social connection, self-harm, and alcohol use in young adults and seek a deeper, more holistic view of how social experiences shape these vital aspects of mental health and well-being. They will use an interdisciplinary mixed-methods framework to design and collect complementary qualitative and quantitative data that provide rich information about their research questions, including changes over time in social networks, urges to and engagement in self-harm, alcohol consumption, and overall mental health among Notre Dame students.
• Michael J. Coppedge, professor of political science, and John Behrens, professor of the practice and director of both the Technology and Digital Studies Program and the College of Arts & Letters Office of Digital Strategy, will introduce an AI-powered modeling and forecasting system — AI-based Modeling of Democratic Development and Decline (AIM-3D) — that harnesses novel machine learning techniques which will allow them to model temporal, nonlinear, and reciprocal relationships between democracy-related variables and constructs with precision and interpretability.
• Cecilia Hanyeol Kim, assistant professor of film production in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, and David Bird, assistant professor of music technology and digital media in the Department of Music, will curate tutorials, interactive assignments, and progress-tracking methods as an online resource to seamlessly integrate with curricula incorporating software utilized in the creative arts. They will also hold reading discussion workshops targeted to the campus community in order to foster a deeper understanding of the applications, implications, and ethical concerns of these technologies.

Josh Tychonievich, managing director of the Franco Institute, said he looks forward to the second year of Research Innovation Collaboratives that will build on the outstanding foundation of the previous year’s implementation of the labs.

“It's been really exciting to see the innovative, interdisciplinary collaborations fostered through this program,” Tychonievich said. “In both application cycles, faculty have reached across departments to create high-impact projects that break new scholarly ground."

Originally published by Jacob Schepers at franco.nd.edu on June 09, 2025.