Peter Cajka

Peter Cajka is Associate Teaching Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies. He came to Notre Dame in 2017 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism after completing his doctorate in American History at Boston College. He began as a faculty member in American Studies in 2020.

Cajka teaches classes on a wide range of topics for Notre Dame students, including “Witnessing the Sixties,” “America’s Culture Wars,” “The Ideas That Made America,” “The Vietnam War & American Catholics,” “American Microstudies,” and “Weird Catholicism.” He regularly offers “The Introduction to American Studies.” He has advised over twenty undergraduate theses, overseeing projects on rap (projects on Tupac, Jay-Z, Lil Nas X, Nicki Minaj), religion, nineteenth century public education policy, law, feminism, the AIDS crisis, foreign affairs, female sports reporters, schools in the culture wars, religious conservativism, Miley Cyrus, horror films, hockey, political humor, and museums. Cajka has taught in every genre available to a Notre Dame faculty member: introduction lectures to over 100 students, upper-level specialized courses, first-year research seminars, senior research seminars, sophomore college seminars, and online courses.

In his role as Director of Undergraduate Studies, Cajka is focused on recruitment to the major, course scheduling, course enrollment, and advising for the majors. He proudly serves as the faculty advisor for Americana, the Department’s undergraduate research journal. He works closely with colleagues and students on a wide range of department-level projects.

Cajka’s primary research interests are in the fields of American Catholic Studies and Intellectual History. More specifically, he is interested in the history and culture of the modern Roman Catholic priesthood. His 2021 book, Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties, was released with the University of Chicago Press. A paperback edition will appear in 2026. This book showed how Catholics, with priests leading the line, incessantly invoked the rights of conscience in debates over conscription during the Vietnam War and in the church itself during the contests over artificial birth control in 1968. Cajka’s new project is a microhistory of the clergy abuse crisis. He focuses on Father Louis Miller and survivors from Louisville to write a new history of sexual violence in American Catholicism in the modern era. Cajka has published scholarly essays in The Journal of the History of Sexuality (forthcoming), Modern Intellectual History, The Sixties: A Journal of Politics, Culture and History, The Journal of Church and State, US Catholic Historian, American Catholic Studies, and Ohio History. Cajka has also authored scholarly essays in edited volumes, and pieces in public-facing scholarly venues such as The Journal of the History of Ideas Blog and Political Theology. His words have appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Religion and Politics, The Conversation, US Catholic, and the National Catholic Reporter. Cajka was named to the Young Scholar of American Religion cohort of 2022 to 2024. He received the A. Bartlett Giamatti Fellowship from Yale University’s Sterling Library – a one month residential fellowship – in the summer of 2024. He served as a Director of the research group “Gender, Sex and Power: Towards a History of Clergy Abuse in the US Catholic Church” from 2020 to 2022.