In 2024, the Cushwa Center is providing funding to 31 scholars for a variety of research projects. Funds will support research at the University of Notre Dame Archives and at other archives in a variety of U.S. cities, including Denver, New York, San Francisco, and Scranton as well as outside the United States, in Paris, Rome, Dublin, Barcelona, and Juárez, Mexico.
The next application deadline for all five of the Cushwa Center’s research funding programs is December 31, 2024.
The Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., Prize
Established in 2020 in partnership with the American Catholic Historical Association, this prize recognizes outstanding research on the Black Catholic experience.
Miguel A. Valerio
Washington University in St. Louis
“Architects of Their World: The Artistic and Ritualistic Spaces of Afro-Brazilian Brotherhoods”
Peter R. D’Agostino Research Travel Grants
Offered in conjunction with Italian Studies at Notre Dame and designed to facilitate the study of the American past from an international perspective, these grants support research in Roman archives for projects on U.S. Catholic history.
Erica Moretti
Fashion Institute of Technology
“Across the Colonial Sea: Family Reunification, Vatican Humanitarianism, and the End of Empire (1940–1950)”
Robert A. Ventresca
King’s University College at Western University (Canada)
“American Catholics, Papal Humanitarianism and Displaced Children after World War Two and the Holocaust”
Hibernian Research Awards
Funded by an endowment from the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians, Hibernian Research Awards support the scholarly study of Irish and Irish American history.
Zara Rose Browne
University of Nevada, Reno
“‘If That Place Could Talk . . .’ Murphy Village: Marriage, Legality, and Identity in an Irish Traveller Catholic Community”
Wendy Felese
Montana State University Billings
“Ourselves Alone: Falls Road and the Shankill in the Wake of Brexit”
Giovan Battista Fidanza
University of Rome Tor Vergata
“The Irish church of St. Isidore in Rome as a means of representing a great tradition: the rhetorical efficacy of the main eighteenth-century pictorial decorations”
Mother Theodore Guerin Research Travel Grants
This program supports scholars whose research projects feature Catholic women more prominently in modern history. Grants are made to scholars seeking to visit any repository in or outside the United States or traveling to conduct oral history interviews, especially of women religious.
Rebecca Berru Davis
Saint Catherine University
“Artist-Activist Sister Karen M. Boccalero and the Emergence of Self Help Graphics for the Latinx Community of East Los Angeles: A Post-Vatican Expression of Franciscan Catholicism”
K.T. Brizek
University of Illinois Chicago
“The Third Hour: Hélène Iswolsky and American Catholicism”
Melissa Coles
University of Notre Dame
“The Relationship between Indigenous Grandmothers and Saint Anne at Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta”
Tyler Davis
St. Mary’s University of San Antonio, Texas
“Bonds of Liberation: Catholic Women Theologians in the Making of an Ecumenical Theology of Liberation”
Gabrielle Guillerm
Maȟpíya Lúta (Red Cloud)
“Truth and Healing at Maȟpíya Lúta (Red Cloud)”
Ella Hadacek
University of Notre Dame
“‘A carnage of [her] social relations’: British and American Women’s Conversion to Catholicism, 1840–1930”
Karen Hanrahan
University College London
“Narrative ‘navigatio’ of nuns and former nuns: Exploring stories of transgression and transcendence through life history”
Brenna Moore
Fordham University
“A Charism of Relationships: The International History of the Little Sisters of the Assumption”
Hayley Roy
Emory University
“‘Wild’ Sisters: Volunteer Nurses in German Overseas Colonies”
Melissa Ursin
University of San Francisco
“From Novitiate to Classroom: A Case Study of the Formation of Catholic Teaching Sisters”
Maria Patricia Williams
Independent Scholar
“Extending Mother Cabrini’s Global Network of Secondary Schools 1918–1930”
Alberto Wilson
Texas Christian University
“Pan American City: Neoliberalism at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Ciudad Juárez’s Working Poor”
Research Travel Grants
Research Travel Grants assist scholars who wish to visit the University Archives and other collections at Notre Dame for research relating to the study of Catholics in America.
Lydia Biggs
Syracuse University
“Ursulines on the Frontier: Race, Indigeneity, and Gender in French Louisiana”
Raúl Burgos
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
“Towards a Pan-American Catholic Alliance: U.S. and Latin American Catholics in the Mid-Twentieth Century”
Dana Freiburger
Independent Scholar
“What Hath God Taught? – Teaching Telegraphy at Notre Dame”
Michael Gioia
Columbia University
“Trans-Atlantic Separations: Catholic Arguments for Religious Disestablishment in France and the United States”
Eilish Gregory
Durham University (United Kingdom)
“The Transnational Nursing and Spiritual Activities of the Little Company of Mary in Chicago, 1893–1941”
Patrick J. Hayes
Redemptorist Archives
“Early American Redemptoristica at Notre Dame, 1832–1850”
Elizabeth A. Huddleston
National Institute for Newman Studies
“‘A Story of Well-Defined Purpose’: Josephine Hope-Scott Ward’s Social Criticism of Modernism”
Mark Lambert
Des Moines University
“A Horror of Moral Beauty: Leprosy, Catholicism, and Native Hawaiian Health”
Sarah Luginbill
Trinity University
“Supplying the Sacred: Portable Mass Kits, American Catholics, and World War I”
Sunny Jane Morton
Independent Scholar
“Finding Nuns and Sisters: A Guide to Women Religious and Their Records”
Brian Mueller
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
“Walking With God: Solidarity & Accompaniment in the Central America Peace Movement”
Teresa Marie Rodriguez
University of Oklahoma
“The Cristero Youth: Childhood in Northern Mexico in the 1920s”
Emily Y. Tran
University of Wisconsin–Madison
“American Reckonings: Confronting and Repressing the Racist Past and Present, 1968–1998”
This announcement appears in the Spring 2024 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.