On Friday, May 4th five American Studies majors presented their work at the fifth annual Undergraduate Scholars Conference at the University of Notre Dame. Featuring research conducted throughout the year and in a variety of different disciplines. Congratulations to these students and to all the students who presented at this year's conference  Read More >

Role-playing games still attract face-to-face players

Whenever I walk into the Griffon in downtown South Bend, I can't help but notice the smell.

When senior Mitch Gainer began interviewing for a position with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), he expected most of his peers to have studied business during their undergraduate careers.

But as he progressed through the interview process, Gainer, an economics major, said he noticed a majority of the interviewees had educational backgrounds grounded in the liberal arts. Read More >

           Robert Costa, a 2008 honors graduate in American Studies, has been singled out by Washingtonian Magazine as one of the nation’s most promising political reporters. In an article (December, 2011) that asks the questions “Who’s the next Tim Russert?” and “Which of the next generation of journalists may be worth following?” Costa is the youngest (at 26) of the five reporters selected for attention. Read More >

Julia Douthwaite, professor of French in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, is organizing a series of events to honor Swiss philosopher and writer Jean–Jacques Rousseau’s 300th birthday and stimulate a cross–disciplinary discussion on social justice and human dignity.

The project, called “Rousseau 2012: On the Road to DIGNITY,” will be part of the curriculum for more than a dozen courses throughout the College of Arts and Letters and the Law School and will feature both guest lectures and an Amnesty International photography exhibit on poverty and human rights that includes portraits from Mexico, Egypt, Nigeria, India and Macedonia. Read More >

Students in Notre Dame’s Department of American Studies recently got an inside perspective on the complexities of creating and maintaining Native American museum collections in a course called Collecting Indians. The fall 2011 class was taught by Scott Stevens, a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Tribe and the director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Read More >

Hip-hop and boxing are not just entertainment for Notre Dame’s two new Moreau Academic Diversity Postdoctoral Fellows, Brian Su-Jen Chung and Jesse Costantino; they’re fertile ground for academic research. Chung, in the American studies department, and Costantino, in English, joined the College of Arts and Letters in fall 2011 as part of a University effort to enhance cultural awareness and diversity within the campus community. Read More >

It started with a bare-bones wire service story that ran in the newspaper in late July 2006—a body had been found along the north bank of the Kansas River in Topeka, and four homeless people had been charged with kidnapping and felony murder. Benedict Giamo, associate professor of American studies, who has written extensively on homelessness in America, found himself fascinated with the story of the life and death of David Owen, 38, an advocate for the homeless and a registered lobbyist. Read More >

October 12, 2011 • Aaron Smith

Ted Robinson began honing his craft as a kid, sitting alone in front of a television with the sound off. There, with the door closed, he would announce ball games, imitating Marv Albert, a New York Knicks and Rangers broadcaster, and Lindsey Nelson, who did Mets games and a national replay show for Notre Dame football. Today, Robinson reaches much larger audiences as a two-time Emmy award-winning broadcaster of seven Summer and Winter Olympics, Wimbledon and French Open tennis, San Francisco 49ers football, and Major League Baseball.
Read More >

Alumnus Helps Vatican into New Media
October 14, 2011 • Rachel Hamilton
At 6 p.m. on the eve of the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul, Pope Benedict XVI picked up his iPad and, with Thaddeus “TJ” Jones ’89 by his side, revolutionized Vatican media with the launch of News.va and the first Papal tweet. Jones, who majored in American Studies and Italian, is the project coordinator for News.va and worked with all of the various media sources, as well as the company that developed the portal, in order to create the site as it exists today.
Read More >