The Crossroads Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Notre Dame Center for Arts and Culture will begin the fall 2013 semester with an exhibition titled, “The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present.” This exhibition, now on tour in the form of educational panels, images and didactics, was originally organized and toured by the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. The original show examined the missing chapter in Mexican history that highlighted the African contributions to Mexican culture over the past nearly 500 years.
Choice magazine has included two books by faculty members in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters on its list of Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012. John Sitter, the Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature in the Department of English, was selected for his Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, while Timothy Matovina, professor of theology and executive director of the Institute for Latino Studies, was honored for Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America’s Largest Church, which also won the College Theology Society’s Best Book Award in 2012, as well as the 2013 Paul J. Foik, C.S.C. Award from the Texas Catholic Historical Society.
José E. Limón, one of the country’s foremost scholars of Latino literature, has been tapped to lead the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies (ILS). As the new director of ILS, he will hold the Julian Samora Chair in Latino Studies. Timothy Matovina, a leading expert on Latino Catholicism, will serve as executive director of the institute, which is housed in the College of Arts and Letters. Both appointments take effect July 1, 2012. Established in 1999, the Institute for Latino Studies supports a variety of interdisciplinary initiatives to foster understanding of the U.S. Latino experience.
Even with the endorsements of three Latinos with strong name recognition in the Latino community, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney could alienate a good portion of Latino voters in Florida with his hardline position on immigration, according to University of Notre Dame political scientist Ricardo Ramírez.
Distinguished scholar Carlos Jáuregui joined the University of Notre Dame faculty this fall as an associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. A native of Bogotá, Colombia, Jáuregui is the author of several books whose scholarship encompasses colonial and transatlantic studies, cultural studies, 19th-century Latin American literature, postcolonial theory, and the cultural history of Spanish America and Brazil.
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling on the sale of violent video games to minors may have been a victory for free speech, but raises an important issue: Do violent video games really harm kids? Absolutely, according to Darcia Narvaez, a University of Notre Dame psychology professor who researches the effect of violent video games on the developing brains of children and teens.