This recognition highlights Kuijt’s 30 years of global heritage research and four years of intensive fieldwork in war-torn Ukraine. Partnering with Notre Dame professor and filmmaker William Donaruma, as well as faculty from Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) and KNU’s Department of Archaeology and Museology, Kuijt began conducting field assessments following a late-2022 seminar co-organized with KNU and the Hv. Vovk Center for Paleoethnological Research. Together, the team documented damage to cultural, historical, and civic infrastructure across de-occupied territories in the Zhytomyr, Kyiv, and Chernihiv regions—ranging from historic churches and museums to libraries, schools, and hospitals.

The award ceremony coincided with the KNU premiere of Kuijt and Donaruma’s latest documentary, 14 Litres of Ukrainian Blood (2026). The making of this film, as well as their previous documentary, Targeting Beauty (2024), was supported by faculty grants issued by the Nanovic Institute. Filmed between 2023 and 2025, 14 Litres of Ukrainian Blood moves beyond archaeology to capture personal accounts of war through interviews with UCU master’s students, military personnel, and clergy.

During the ceremony, the KNU rector commended Kuijt’s commitment to preserving Ukrainian heritage. He then presented Kuijt with Day After the War, a book project written collaboratively by KNU students and faculty which underscores the importance of memory, solidarity, and victory. The book echoes a core premise of Kuijt’s mission and work: recording sites of cultural heritage is about so much more than preserving the past; it is about securing the living identity that will shape Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction.

For further details on the conferral ceremony, view the official press release from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Originally published by Grant Osborn and Roy Kimmey at nanovic.nd.edu on August 22, 2026.

“The advantage for the selected Ph.D. students is that the fellowship allows for them to focus on their research without the distraction of administrative duties,” said Marian Botchway, assistant director of training and educational programs at the Eck Institute for Global Health. “These Ph.D. students can immerse themselves in their data collection, analysis, and writing.”

Prakash B K

“My area of study is ‘caste,’” said Prakash B K, a Ph.D. student in anthropology. “In South Asian scholarship, caste has long been interpreted and understood as a primarily social and cultural phenomenon — a system of hierarchy reproduced through notions of purity and pollution, marriage within one's caste, kinship-based occupational segregation, and everyday practices of touchability and untouchability.”

He further explains, “Caste is also becoming a burgeoning health issue—one that has been overlooked in academia, particularly in the fields of global health and global mental health. Much like racial inequities in Western societies, caste functions as a deeply entrenched structure of power that organizes social life. Its effects are not merely social but profoundly embodied, shaping who is exposed to suffering, whose pain is recognized, and who receives care. Caste is a central axis of health inequality affecting more than 260 million Dalits worldwide.”

Prakash B K is mentored by Aidan Seale-Feldman, assistant professor, and Vania Smith-Oka, professor, both in the Department of Anthropology.

“With their expertise in medical and psychological anthropology, they helped me refine my research questions, pushing me to think more critically about how caste operates within clinical spaces. They also offered detailed feedback on my preliminary findings and emerging analysis, especially around the concepts of microaggression and structural violence,” he said.

This fellowship allowed B K to immerse himself in a psychiatric hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, for 12 months.

“As an anthropologist, I know that trust, rapport, and deep understanding cannot be rushed," he said. "The fellowship gave me the time I needed to observe seasonal changes in patient intake, to witness the same patients across multiple consultations, and to build genuine relationships with Dalit patients who had every reason to be wary of a researcher.”

Through his interactions with the Eck Institute, B K learned to translate his anthropological insights into a language that could engage global health practitioners.

“I learned to explain why caste matters for health outcomes, not just for social structure. It required me to speak outside my disciplinary comfort zone, and that stretching has made my research stronger,” he said. “Before the Eck Fellowship, I wanted to be a good anthropologist. Now, I want to be an anthropologist who makes caste impossible to ignore in global health. The fellowship gave me that vision, and I am now actively looking for a postdoctoral scholarship position in order to pursue it.”

Read more Ph.D. student stories whose studies intersect in global health in different ways and locations.

Global Health Fellowship

Every other year, the Eck Institute awards a limited number of graduate fellowships that provide additional financial support for outstanding students. Fellowship recipients benefit from resources and formal affiliation with the Institute while continuing to advance their disciplinary research that addresses global health challenges.

The Eck Institute’s Ph.D. Fellowship program includes opportunities to make important connections to global health resources, which include support from the vast network of the Eck Institute’s core and affiliated faculty, periodic check-in meetings with Eck Institute directors, lunches with peer Ph.D. fellowship students for sharing research challenges and insights, research presentation opportunities for valuable feedback, as well as attendance at the Eck Institute’s Global Health Speaker Series events.

Botchway said, “Anyone who is working on dissertation research that's linked to health can apply to this funding program. We welcome applications from across the entire university, and I encourage any interested candidates to reach out to me to learn more.”

To learn more about the Eck Institute’s Ph.D. Fellowship program, please visit: https://globalhealth.nd.edu/education/PhD/. The next application cycle will begin in spring 2027.

Contact:
Damienne Jugovic, Research Communications Specialist
Notre Dame Research / University of Notre Dame
djugovic@nd.edu
research.nd.edu / @UNDResearch

About the Eck Institute for Global Health
The Eck Institute for Global Health, an integral part of Notre Dame Research, builds on the University’s historical strength in infectious disease research, including vector-borne diseases, while broadening the interdisciplinary expertise into other key global health areas including non-communicable diseases; maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH); and global health security. The Eck Institute recognizes health as a fundamental human right and promotes research, training, and service to advance health standards and reduce health disparities, especially for those who are disproportionately impacted by preventable diseases. The Eck Institute is training the next generation of global health researchers and leaders through undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral programs.

Originally published by Damienne Jugovic at globalhealth.nd.edu on June 08, 2026.

In the United States, ample attention was given to the novelty of how dads, in particular, were getting much more time to participate in the daily, often mundane, and yet intimate tasks of child-rearing. Many people hoped that the change would persist, allowing dads more time and flexibility in the long term — ultimately reshaping how we view fatherhood in general.

However, according to new research from anthropologist and fatherhood expert Lee Gettler of the University of Notre Dame, those fathering benefits have not outlasted the pandemic itself.

“COVID didn’t really lead to a large-scale uptick in this new vision for fathering on the part of dads across the board,” said Gettler, the Rev. John A. O’Brien College Professor of Anthropology and chair of the Department of Anthropology, as well as an affiliated faculty at the Eck Institute for Global Health and the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families.

“I think what’s been missing from many of those initial reports was a wider perspective on what the realities are for families and fathers in the United States and around the world following the pandemic,” he said, “especially as we think about common jobs for men, precarity in the workplace, and economic inequality.”

To address those gaps in understanding, Gettler and his team, which included co-author and postdoctoral research associate Sarah Hoegler Dennis, relied on 15 years of longitudinal data to compare fathers’ pre-COVID to post-COVID behaviors. The researchers looked at this data from a non-Euro-American perspective in a major metropolitan area in the Philippines.

What they found was that fathering behaviors, for the most part, did not change much before COVID began versus shortly after the pandemic ended.

“There was this idea out there that a meaningful percentage of dads were spending more time with their kids during the lockdown periods, even if they were still working, and that the dynamics of COVID would lead to this long-term effect on what and how much dads were doing within their families,” Gettler said. “And we just didn’t see that prevailing change.”

The research team drew on a large sample of men who were around 25 years old at the start of the study and followed them for the next 15 years as part of a larger set of research in Cebu, Philippines. Gettler and his team have been studying fathering and the “biology of fatherhood” as part of this project for close to 20 years, and have found that fathers in Cebu have become much more involved in the past few decades, mirroring father involvement in the United States.

During the pandemic, the Philippines also had one of the longest lockdown periods in the world, according to Gettler, with some of the most strict, government-mandated quarantine guidelines in place, making this an appropriate site to test for the effects of the stay-at-home orders on fathering.

“There are questions remaining about how we can continue to encourage dads in dual-parent families to pull their weight, be a supportive partner or to balance the responsibilities of what it takes to run a household and take care of young children. COVID exposed or habituated more dads to what that can look like, but now we need to enable them to continue that behavior.”

The researchers used waves of socio-demographic and fathers’ caregiving data collected prior to the pandemic (2009 and 2014) and after the pandemic (2022-23). The main analyses focused on caregiving changes over time for fathers who had young children at home both pre- and post-pandemic, looking at how involved they were with routine, hands-on care for babies and young children, recreational play and activities, and educational caregiving tasks.

“What we found is that COVID — and the time dads spent at home with their children during that period — did not change fathering in any lasting way,” Gettler said. “As soon as life gets back to normal, we see that dads are continuing to do the same thing they were doing before COVID.”

With one exception, Gettler noted.

For the group of fathers who found themselves going from employed to either unemployed or underemployed because of the pandemic, their involvement with their children’s educational care shot up noticeably, and the change persisted.

“We see this link with employment status and fathers’ ability to spend more time helping kids with school work and homework,” Gettler said. “But that’s the only hint that the conditions surrounding COVID may have contributed to some sort of change in what dads are doing at home.”

At the end of the day, dad’s employment status is the primary predictor for how much care he is providing, Gettler said. He believes that policy changes within the workplace — such as paid paternity leave and widespread flexibility on working from home or setting working hours — might lead to a more lasting change in fatherhood behavior. These structural changes could support permanent shifts in expectations and norms for men as caregivers, and open up more opportunities for dads to get — and stay — involved.

Gettler argued that society needs to recognize how it can better support dads and give them the chance to be more available at home, without the caveat of having to become unemployed or underemployed in order to enjoy such chances to be with their families.

“There are questions remaining about how we can continue to encourage dads in dual-parent families to pull their weight, be a supportive partner or to balance the responsibilities of what it takes to run a household and take care of young children,” Gettler said. “COVID exposed or habituated more dads to what that can look like, but now we need to enable them to continue that behavior.”

Gettler, who is also director of the Hormones, Health, and Human Behavior Lab, works with collaborators at multiple global sites and is an expert on fatherhood and healthy families, including the psychobiology of motherhood and fatherhood and parents’ physical and mental health, as well as child growth, development and physiology. Presently, Gettler works on research projects related to these interests in the United States, the Philippines and the Republic of the Congo.

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Tracy DeStazio at news.nd.edu on April 30, 2026.

During pregnancy, maternal and fetal cells migrate back and forth across the placenta, with fetal cells entering the mother’s bloodstream and tissues. They can settle in maternal organs such as the thyroid, liver, lungs, brain and heart — and can persist there for decades. Conversely, maternal cells can enter the fetus and be passed down to future generations, essentially creating a lifelong connection between mothers, their offspring and their descendants.

In other words, we all carry little pieces of our family with us.

This phenomenon, called microchimerism, is often characterized by cells of different genetic origin that circulate within the body and can occur either naturally through pregnancy or artificially through organ transplantation and blood transfusions. Microchimeric cells can be transferred from a fetus to its mother, from the mother to her children and even back and forth between multiples within the womb.

What microchimeric cells do

Microchimeric cells can play complex roles in a person’s body, often beneficial as well as harmful. They can help heal wounds, repair tissue and regulate the immune system, but they have also been linked to pregnancy complications as well as autoimmune diseases such as scleroderma and rheumatoid arthritis, and certain cancers like leukemia.

Microchimerism is not new. Its existence has been well documented since its discovery in the late 19th century, but it has recently made a resurgence in popular mainstream media.

However, what microchimeric cells do, how they move between bodies and what their role is in health outcomes remain largely unknown.

“These cells are extremely rare, making up less than 1 percent of the total cells in our body, and are difficult to detect,” said Kristine Joy Chua, a biological anthropologist in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Anthropology. Her work focuses on the social and biological factors that affect pregnancies and pregnant mothers.

According to Chua, “Maternal and fetal cells have similar DNA because they come from the same source genetically. The challenge lies in detecting them and isolating them independently.”

The Microchimerism, Human Health & Evolution Project

Their rarity has fueled skepticism within the scientific community, with researchers questioning whether these cells matter or have any meaningful impact on human health. Despite these critiques, microchimerism researchers have continued to examine and learn about them, synthesizing their efforts in a recent publication co-led by Chua in the journal Advanced Science.

It is the first publication by the Microchimerism, Human Health & Evolution Project, a multidisciplinary microchimerism consortium, that sought to identify the field’s most pressing questions to advance microchimerism research. The project team surveyed 29 leading experts in the field of microchimerism and found that, as a community, they need to define what these cells are, examine why they exist and persist, set protocols for how to collect and detect them in the lab, and analyze their function and role in health and disease.

Potential benefits of microchimeric cells

With the development of more advanced modern technologies, experts are more confident that they may circumvent previous difficulties in research design or execution to better understand what microchimeric cells do. Doing so can bring researchers one step closer to developing diagnostic and therapeutic tools.

For example, the experts noted the potential to harness the stem cell-like properties of microchimeric cells, which could allow these cells to morph into organ-specific cells that could be used restoratively in patients with thyroid or liver damage.

“They could also be used as a biomarker for those who are at risk for certain pregnancy complications such as pre-eclampsia, spontaneous abortion and placental dysfunction,” Chua explained. “Based on the quantity of these cells or their phenotype, it is possible that these cells have real implications for how we look at maternal health and intervention.”

Microchimeric cells can also explain the intergenerational health of a family — how and where particular diseases and health deficiencies are passed along, especially immune-related disorders. “If we can better understand how diseases start in a person’s body, perhaps that could inform how we prevent some of these complications, potentially leading to better health,” Chua suggested.

“If we can better understand how diseases start in a person’s body, perhaps that could inform how we prevent some of these complications, potentially leading to better health.” 

The future of the research

In addition to certain methodological constraints, the authors noted additional challenges that appear to be relevant to all scientists studying reproductive biology and pregnancy. These include ethical constraints related to biosample collection from pregnant individuals, concerns over formal consent and addressing these concerns on a global scale. They also called for more research priorities to shift toward pregnancy and women’s health, more broadly, along with a more developed research community to advance the field.

They hope that by assembling this consortium of scientists, they will be able to establish new and innovative collaborations, train future researchers in standardized methods for studying microchimerism and create pipelines to allow for the sharing of ideas — all in an effort to continue growing the microchimerism community.

Chua said she hopes more anthropologists will join her to further the study of microchimerism and its role in pregnancy and intergenerational health.

“We know that pregnancy outcomes are not just a product of our biology, but also of our social environment,” she said. “Together, they shape how the body reacts to being pregnant and giving birth. We cannot forget about the social environment — it is a component that requires more attention in microchimerism research.”

Funding support is provided from the John Templeton Foundation and the Intramural Research Program of the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health.

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Tracy DeStazio at news.nd.edu on January 22, 2026.

Notre Dame associate professors Brian Krostenko and Alex E. Chávez, from the departments of Classics and Anthropology, respectively, kickstarted a summer of writing and research through the National Humanities Center’s Summer Residency Program.

The NHC is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to elevating the liberal arts through fellowships and educational outreach. The residency program brings exceptional scholars to the NHC’s North Carolina facility to spend four weeks solely working on a current project. Summer residents are supported with library materials, professional development sessions, and the opportunity to connect with scholars from around the country.

The Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good has supported residencies and continued to do so with Krostenko and Chávez’s work. The two are also a part of the inaugural cohort of Franco Humanities Fellows, which allows them to devote full-time effort to research and writing while providing a forum for sharing and discussing their work in progress.

Franco will continue its support of the residency, and tenure-line faculty interested in participating in the 2026 program should email Kevin Gallin (kgallin@nd.edu), assistant director of research development for the Franco Institute, by Friday, Oct. 31; the Franco Family Institute will manage the internal nomination process.

“We are proud to support Alex and Brian’s excellent work by sponsoring their summer fellowship at the NHC,” Gallin said. “We look forward to seeing how their work advances from here, and to continue our support for research — and scholars — across the College.”

Reframing ancient rhetoric

Krostenko came out of his NHC residency with two new book chapters and some unexpected connections.

His upcoming book, tentatively titled “It’s Our World Now,” will explore the influence of rhetoric on the practice of law in the Roman world, drawing on analysis of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, an ancient Latin text Krostenko describes as a “rhetorical handbook.” Its author gives recommendations on how to speak in certain rhetorical styles with practical examples of good rhetoric and bad rhetoric.

In his time as a classics professor, teaching the Rhetorica ad Herennium to semester after semester of students, Krostenko has developed a new way of looking at its author’s intentions and message.

“The author is of the view that rhetorical form is a way of helping you think better,” he said. “For him, rhetoric is ultimately a method of training your own cognitive habits, as opposed to distracting people from the truth by something that’s beautiful.”

With that idea in mind, Krostenko is using Rhetorica ad Herennium as a test case to explore the relationship between the beautiful and the useful — how sounding better can mean thinking more clearly and effectively.

Krostenko’s ventured outside his field in his research and in his discussions with other scholars at the NHC. He met people studying topics from Ottoman court records to the impact of protests on text messaging patterns, but conversations with a scholar studying the discourse of astrology were especially enlightening for him.

Astrology — which ties the positions of the stars and planets to human behavior — is often seen as in opposition to science and logic, but can still aid practitioners in confronting uncertainty, Krostenko learned. Recognizing the value of a quasi-rational subject like astrology helped Krostenko see his own work in a new way.

“That sort of act of sympathy with a person who doesn’t agree with you is exactly the sort of thing that helped me deepen my understanding of the ‘bad’ rhetoric I was looking at,” he said.

Sound and historical silence

Chávez approaches the study of cultural anthropology in a unique way — through sound.

A faculty fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies and the Initiative on Race and Resilience, Chávez specifically focuses on sound and aurality as they pertain to the Latino experience. His first book, Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño, explores music and migration on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and in his recently released solo debut album — Sonorous Present, which was featured in Rolling Stone — he ponders race, migration, and mourning through music and poetry.

Earlier this year, he was selected to give the Galarza Lecture at Stanford University, a high honor for a Latino studies scholar, as past presenters include Dolores Huerta, Luis Valdez, Sandra Cisneros, Renato Rosaldo, Cherrie Moraga, Jorge A. Bustamante, and Notre Dame's own Julian Samora.

As a scholar and artist so finely attuned to sound, Chávez notices where there’s silence.

He was first surprised to learn of the robust historical presence of Latinos in the Midwest when he first moved to the area, particularly in Chicago, which is home to the sixth-largest Latino population in the country.

“It’s not something that necessarily registers in our cultural atlas of where we think of Latino communities existing historically — West Coast or East Coast, New York and Miami,” Chávez said. “That presents the question, ‘Why is there silence around the Latino Midwest?’”

His next book, tentatively titled “Sound City: Places, Poiesis, Xicago,” aims to address that silence, to locate the Latino Midwest in America’s placial and racial imagination. Using ethnographic research on sound — found in youth radio, vinyl records, literature, soundscapes, and everything in between — Chávez will tell the story of Latino Chicago.

“How do we hear Chicago, and when we listen, who do we imagine and hear as citizens of the city?” he said. “What are those histories and cultural understandings?”

His summer residency brought him closer to answering those questions. With his on-the-ground research already completed, Chávez just needed time to write — and the NHC provided that and more.

“Carving out time that’s purposeful and intentional can be really elusive,” he said. “But the NHC makes for an ideal place to gather your thoughts and concentrate on writing.”

Originally published by Adah McMillan at al.nd.edu on October 27, 2025.

The research partnerships enabled by this grant program strengthen the relationship between these two Catholic institutions, a bond established more than two decades ago. In 2004, just after the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) was founded as the first Catholic university on territory of the former Soviet Union, the Catholic Universities Partnership was formed under the leadership of Notre Dame’s Nanovic Institute for European Studies, bringing together nine European institutions including UCU for research, leadership and visiting scholars programs.

Just months after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., then-president of Notre Dame, and Metropolitan-Archbishop Borys Gudziak, organizer and president of Ukrainian Catholic University, agreed to expand the existing partnership between Notre Dame and UCU. Part of the expansion is the distribution of grants for faculty at both universities to pursue joint research projects and nurture ongoing collaboration.

“At a critical moment in Ukraine’s history, the commitment between our two universities is a testament to our Catholic mission and identity,” said Michael Pippenger, Notre Dame vice president & associate provost for internationalization. “These research collaborations advance our mutual research priorities for the common good, bringing together our faculty and students, which is a great investment in our shared future.”

"This collaboration between our universities offers a unique opportunity to jointly address some of the most pressing challenges of our time," said Yaroslav Prytula, Ukrainian Catholic University provost. "It is not only an act of solidarity but a shared mission to shape ethical leadership, rebuild democratic resilience, and contribute to the common good."

The 2025 awardees of the ND - UCU Faculty Collaboration Grant are described below.

Yury P. Avvakumov and Oleh Turiy will lead a study titled “Religious Freedom in Contemporary Ukraine: Historical Transformations and the Challenges of War.” Avvakumov, an associate professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Theology, will be joined by Sean Griffin, an associate professor of Slavic, and Eurasian Studies. Turiy, head of the Institute of Church History at UCU, will work with associate professor Svitlana Hurkina and Myroslav Marynovych, president of UCU’s Institute of Religion and Society. The researchers will examine the re-emergence of the Greek Catholic Church and new religious denominations established in Ukraine during the late Soviet period, drawing on official state documents and government records, as well as newspapers, personal letters, interviews and photographs. The research team is especially interested in the interactions between Christian denominations, and the relationship between church and state situated within the changing social and political landscape of the late 20th century.

E. Mark Cummings and Oleksandr Avramchuk will lead a study titled “The adaptation and pilot testing of the Promoting a Positive Family Future (PPFF) intervention for veteran families in Ukraine.” Cummings, the William J. Shaw Family Professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology and director of the Family Studies Lab, will be joined by Kathleen N. Bergman, psychology research assistant professor, Sarah (Hoegler) Dennis, postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Anthropology, and Reyhaneh Sadat Razavi, psychology graduate student. Avramchuk, head of UCU’s Department of Clinical Psychology - Faculty of Health Science, will be joined by Oksana Senyk, lecturer in the Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, and Kristina Obluchynska-Shabazova, lecturer in the Department of Clinical Psychology at UCU. The researchers will explore how psychological trauma affects the family dynamic of Ukrainian veterans when they return to civilian life after war. The initial phase will consist of focus groups and interviews with veterans and their families to analyze mental states and family dynamics. With the goal of collective healing in mind, the project ultimately aims to adapt the psychosocial intervention program Promoting Positive Family Futures (PPFF) for Ukrainian families.

Alan Huebner, teaching professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, will collaborate with Tetiana Zakharchenko, program director of computer science in UCU’s Faculty of Applied Sciences, to head a study titled “Lost Knowledge: A Data-Driven Study of K-12 Math Learning in Ukraine.” Rostyslav Hryniv, chair of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at UCU, and Inha Kozlova, associate professor in the UCU Department of Sociology, will serve as co-principal investigators. The researchers will investigate learning outcomes in math among K-12 Ukrainian students during recent years with the hope of providing guidance for educational recovery. The team will implement two approaches: quantitative analysis of multiple assessment results and interviews with students and math teachers to assess the qualitative impact of uncertainty on teaching and learning. The ultimate goal of the study is to advise schools on curriculum adjustments and supports to raise student performance in moving forward.

Debra Javeline, professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science, and Pavlo Khud, lecturer in the UCU Department of Management and Organizational Development, will pursue a project titled “Network Leadership for Democratic Resilience in Ukraine.” The pair will join Andriy Rozhdestvensky, executive director of the Center for Leadership at UCU. Spanning policy advocacy, civic engagement, and organizational leadership, the team will study and evaluate social networks among leaders of non-governmental organizations that have played a critical role in sustaining Ukraine’s democratic values. By examining these leadership structures, researchers aim to identify best practices for strengthening democratic governance.

Rahul Oka, associate research professor in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and the Department of Anthropology, and Iryna Semkiv, associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy at UCU, will co-lead a project titled “Exploring the Built Environment to Understand Collective Trauma and the Potential of Community-Based Collective Healing in Ukraine.” They will join co-principal investigators Marianne Cusato, professor of the practice in the School of Architecture, Lee Gettler, the Rev. John A. O'Brien College Professor of Anthropology and chair of the department, professor Roman Kechur and assistant professor Tetyana Zavada of UCU’s Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, and Dmytro Myronovych, associate professor in the UCU Department of Sociology. This interdisciplinary team will investigate the connection between the use of public and private spaces and the psychosocial processes that affect physical and mental health. The project is particularly concerned with how the built environment may mitigate the trauma experienced by veterans and civilians by forging social bonds. More broadly, the project will aim to deliver policy recommendations to local officials and architects with adaptable best practices for rebuilding damaged Ukrainian communities with trauma recovery in mind.

Clemens Sedmak, director of Notre Dame’s Nanovic Institute for European Studies, will work with Volodymyr Turchynovskyy, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and director of the International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues at UCU, to advance a collaborative historical and ethical study titled “The Moral Biography of Ukraine.” They will be joined by John Deak, associate professor in the Department of History, A. James McAdams, emeritus faculty in the Department of Political Science, Anatolii Babynskyi, professor in the Institute of Church History, and Nataliya Yakymets, deputy director of research at UCU’s International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues. The team plans to survey the systems that safeguard moral values in Ukraine by researching key moments in the nation’s history. These systems, together called ethical infrastructure, are crucial for upholding democracy and require continuous effort to maintain. The researchers will examine 15 episodes in the moral history of Ukraine since 1989 to identify where this ethical infrastructure has succeeded and failed to sustain human dignity and the common good.

Suzanne Shanahan and Rev. Yuriy Shchurko will head a project titled “Bringing a Just Peace to Ukraine.” Shanahan, Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director and professor of the practice at Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns, will be joined by colleagues Daniel Philpott, a professor in the Department of Political Science, and Gerard Powers, director of Catholic Peacebuilding Studies at the Kroc Institute. Rev. Yuriy Martynyuk, senior professor of Theology, and Dmytro Tsolin, professor in the Department of Biblical Studies, will work alongside Shchurko, dean of the Theology-Philosophy Faculty at UCU. The project aims to establish a Center for Just Peace at UCU. The founding of the Center will follow a first phase of preliminary scholarship examining the Catholic theological approaches to peace, reconciliation after war, and the ideologies that power totalitarian governance. At the Center, the researchers envision continued research on building just peace in Ukraine, platforms for dialogue, and the development of educational programs for people in positions of power.

“The research enabled by this initiative will help to advance the safety, security, and well-being of those most impacted by the war in Ukraine, and pave avenues for the physical and cultural recovery of the nation,” said Jeffrey F. Rhoads, John and Catherine Martin Family Vice President for Research and Professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. “Notre Dame Research is pleased to honor the University’s commitment to our Ukrainian colleagues through these important research collaborations.”

To learn more about the Notre Dame-Ukrainian Catholic University Faculty Collaboration Grant Program, please visit https://global.nd.edu/faculty-research/grants-and-funding/university-of-notre-dame-ukrainian-catholic-university-faculty-collaboration-grant-program/.

Contact

Erin Fennessy / Writing Program Manager

Notre Dame Research / University of Notre Dame

efenness@nd.edu / +1 574-631-8183

research.nd.edu / @UNDResearch / linkedin.com/company/undresearch

About Notre Dame Research

The University of Notre Dame is a private research and teaching university inspired by its Catholic mission. Located in South Bend, Indiana, its researchers are advancing human understanding through research, scholarship, education, and creative endeavor in order to be a repository for knowledge and a powerful means for doing good in the world. For more information, please see research.nd.edu or @UNDResearch.

Originally published by Erin Fennessy at research.nd.edu on July 02, 2025.

For Charlotte Cardarella, a visit to the Scholastic book fair in first grade turned out to be a career-defining moment.

Among the picture books and novelty erasers, she found a book on mummification in ancient Egypt — one with clear overlays on each page depicting the stages of the ritual and touching on everything from canopic jars to hieroglyphs. She was instantly fascinated.

“Something about it was so interesting to me, and I was hooked,” Cardarella said. “After taking that book home, I remember looking for another book on how to read hieroglyphs. I worked on teaching myself hieroglyphs for years. The more I read, the more I wanted to know.”

By the time she was in high school, Cardarella thought she would leave her interest in Egyptology behind. She had also developed passions for math and science and decided to pursue what she thought would be a more practical major in college: mechanical engineering. But after being accepted to numerous engineering programs, she had an epiphany.

“I realized, ‘I don’t want to do this. I’m doing it for the wrong reasons,’” she said. “My grandfather was an engineer, and I was planning to do it for my family’s sake. But my family assured me they would be happier if I was doing something that made me happy.”

Cardarella, who is from Temecula, California, spent her first year at Holy Cross College reevaluating her career path. While she was there, she joined the Notre Dame Marching Band and soon fell in love with the campus and the community. She transferred to Notre Dame as a sophomore and decided to major in Arabic and Anthropology, with the ultimate goal of studying ancient Egypt.

“I had never been to the Midwest before visiting campus with my dad during my senior year of high school, but this place has become a second home to me,” she said. “Coming to Notre Dame was the best decision I could have made.”

Cardarella focuses on archaeology in her anthropology major and has had the chance to participate in two digs at Collier Lodge on the banks of the Kankakee River in Indiana.

That hands-on experience will be invaluable next year as she begins a graduate program in Egyptology at the University of Chicago.

“It’s incredible to be able to do this level of research as an undergrad,” she said. “It’s pretty common for archaeology students to go to graduate school never having done a dig, and I feel so lucky that I’ve gotten to do it twice here.”

On campus, Cardarella works in an archaeology lab, studying Jordanian pottery from Bâb edh-Dhrâ, the site of an Early Bronze Age cemetery near the Dead Sea. She also works as a research assistant in the Center for Environmental Science and Technology, where she just finished a senior thesis under the guidance of Professor Mark Schurr. For that project, she used stable isotope analysis to reconstruct the climate of the Kankakee Valley based on Native American artifacts and shells she found while working at the dig.

“I think when people think of archaeology, they either think of Indiana Jones, or they think you’re just digging and doing paperwork,” she said. “And, to be fair, that’s part of it. But there’s so much more to it than that. We get to use these really cool, STEM-based methodologies all the time in the lab. I still love math and science, and I love that I can do that as part of my anthropology major.”

Read her full story at nd.edu/commencement-2025

Originally published by Carrie Gates at al.nd.edu on May 14, 2025.

On Thursday, March 27, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced the 2024 class of AAAS Fellows including Lee Gettler, the Rev. John A. O’Brien College Professor of Anthropology in the College of Arts & Letters at the University of Notre Dame.

The 2024 class comprises 471 scientists, engineers, and innovators across two dozen disciplines including anthropology, astronomy, biological sciences, chemistry, engineering, and physics. AAAS is one of the world’s largest general scientific societies, and to be elected as a fellow is a lifetime honor.

“Professor Lee Gettler’s election to the American Association for the Advancement of Science is a well-deserved recognition of his superb scholarship and continued dedication to advancing our understanding of fatherhood, family dynamics and human development,” said John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost. “We are proud to congratulate him as an alumnus and a member of Notre Dame’s distinguished faculty.”

Gettler was recognized for his distinguished contributions to the fields of biological anthropology and human biology, particularly in the areas of male physiology and the evolution of human fathering.

His research, which has been funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Jacobs Foundation among others, has focused on how men’s hormone physiology responds to major life transitions, such as marriage and fatherhood, and how men’s hormones relate to their behavior as parents and partners. Gettler draws on this work to frame questions about fathers’ roles in the evolutionary past. He has expanded his research to include studying variation in family life, parents’ health and child physiology.

AAAS launched its lifetime fellowship recognition in 1874, about 25 years after the association was founded. This first cohort included Rev. Joseph Celestine Basile Carrier, C.S.C., who in 1865 became the first director of the newly established College of Science at the University of Notre Dame.

Gettler is chair of the Department of Anthropology, director of Notre Dame’s Hormones, Health and Human Behavior Lab, and a faculty affiliate of the Eck Institute for Global Health and the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families.

More on Gettler’s research:

There’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to addressing men’s health issues globally

Family guy: Notre Dame anthropologist Lee Gettler broadens perspectives on fatherhood, raising healthy children

Multi-decade research links fathers’ testosterone production to their adolescent experiences with their own fathers

New study first to define link between testosterone and fathers’ social roles outside the family

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Jessica Sieff at news.nd.edu on March 27, 2025.

It is a bright October day on Inishbofin, an island with a population of about 200 off the west coast of County Galway in Ireland, and the community has gathered at the local library branch to celebrate the opening of a new repository housing copies of archival documents. At this launch, copies of historic tax, census, birth, and marriage records are made available for attendees to examine, and the crowd hummed with exclamations of people finding themselves and their families represented among the displayed records.

The gift of this repository emerged from a yearslong project led by Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies Meredith Chesson, a fellow of both the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs. As a member of the Cultural Landscapes of Irish Coast team, led by Professor of Anthropology Ian Kuijt, Chesson worked for several years to compile copies of archival documents from local and national sources within Ireland now housed in the new Inishbofin Library Local Studies Collection. The Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies provided funding for this archival research and the establishment of this repository.

The collection includes digital and hard copies of census documents from 1901 to 1911, parish records from between 1867 and 1919, two boat registries from the early twentieth century, and valuation records starting from 1842—all relating to life on Inishbofin, Inishark, and Inishturk. These documents are available for viewing in the Co. Galway Library branch on Inishbofin. Chesson and her team spent the bulk of the project painstakingly combing national databases and archives, especially the Valuation Office and National Archives in Dublin, to identify records relating to the three islands, copy them, and organize them for storage and use in the new repository.

While census records can be accessed digitally through Ireland’s National Archive and parish records can be found online through websites like Ireland’s National Library and Ancestry.com, valuation records are only accessible to the public through two-hour in-person viewing appointments with Ireland’s Valuation Office in Dublin. Previously, viewing these records was difficult for most community members on Inishbofin due to the cost and extensive logistics of making an appointment and traveling to Dublin. Now with the repository open, community members can easily access copies of these valuation records locally alongside parish and census records. In discussing this project, Chesson described the partnership with the Valuation Office in accessing and copying the more difficult-to-find documents housed in their archive, “In particular, the Valuation Office staff members were really gracious and supportive of this project.”

Audrey Murray, Co. Galway Librarian for Inishbofin, and Chesson organized the launch as part of the centenary celebrations of the Co. Galway Libraries and Archives. Senior Executive Librarian of Co. Galway Library Jo Fahey and Galway County Council Archivist Patria McWalter attended the launch, along with several government dignitaries including the Galway City Archaeologist Jim Higgins, Gearoid Conroy from the Galway office of the National Monuments Service, and 35 community members who took time out of their busy workdays. The launch featured displays of historical documents for attendees to peruse, a ceremony, and a lunch. Chesson remarked on how the community members engaged with and enjoyed examining the documents during the event, “People were just really interested in when, both before and after the ceremony, we left all of the archives out. They were diving into the documents. And they were saying, ‘Oh, I found this!’ and, ‘Oh, look at this.’ ‘I want to see this.’ ‘Oh, here's my name.’ ‘This is me, right?’ They were really quite pleased about this gift to the community.”

Additionally, Chesson collaborated with the teachers from Inishbofin’s National School. Primary school students created projects for display at the launch. They examined their school’s archival records, including inspection reports and curricular guides for mostly laundry and cooking. The students reflected on the differences between being in school on Inishbofin now and in the early twentieth century.

Depending on their age, students drew pictures or wrote reports which were exhibited alongside copies of the historical documents. These projects highlighted increased access to technology, better facilities, and improvements in education for women and girls as some of the most prominent differences while similarities included the persistence of rules, homework, and the teaching of the Irish language.

Chesson calls the collection a “living repository” that will be added to by her team and local islanders. Together with Kuijt, she hopes to collaborate with local historian and archaeologist Tommy Burke to document land plots and historical buildings on Inishbofin, collect oral histories about these spaces, and link these places with the people mentioned in the archival records in the Local Studies Collection, which provides a foundation for this future heritage research.

The Inishbofin Local Studies Collection is designed as both a way to preserve island heritage and as a gift to the community members. Islanders, and those descended from islanders who left Inishbofin, Inishark, and Inishturk, can easily access a plethora of sources for genealogical and heritage projects. Chesson recounted a story of one woman, whose ancestors used to live on Inishark who came to the repository looking for information about her ancestral home. Using an archeological map from an architectural survey of Inishark’s village, Chesson helped her pinpoint the site of her family’s home from 1855, which is no longer standing, and the location of the house her family moved to around 1894, which still exists. It is this type of genealogical and heritage work that Chesson hopes to enable for the community with these materials. While the community was engaged and pleased at the opening of the Inishbofin Library Local Studies Collection, she emphasized that this is an ongoing project, a dynamic and expanding repository that will become a home for more historical, archeological, and cultural documents as research by islanders and the archaeologists continue.

Chesson insists, “We will continue to add to it, and as the community gathers things, they also can continue to add to it. So it's a living gift that just keeps going,” making the repository a gift to the community both now and well into the future.

Originally published by Cecelia Swartz at nanovic.nd.edu on November 25, 2024.

The war in Ukraine is not just a war against a people, but a war on culture.

And after nearly two years of fighting, it is destroying Ukraine’s cultural heritage on a scale not seen since World War II, according to new research by University of Notre Dame faculty members Ian Kuijt and William Donaruma.

Kuijt, a professor in the Department of Anthropology, and Donaruma, a professor of the practice in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre, visited Ukraine to see firsthand and begin to document the extent of the damage to cultural sites including churches, schools, opera houses, libraries and archaeological sites.

Working in collaboration with researchers from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, the Institute of Archaeology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the University of Wyoming, the team completed the first ground-based survey of the region since the invasion. Their findings were recently published in the journal Antiquity.

“The intent by the Russians is essentially obliterating Ukrainian culture, heritage and history,” Kuijt said. “They have been targeting cultural features of society that have no military capability, no hardened infrastructures that would be used in defense. And there are many researchers who have started doing work with satellite and aerial photos, but at some point, you have to go into the field to truly get a sense of the damage.”

Kuijt and Donaruma visited liberated areas in Ukraine to assess, film and document the destruction. Their interdisciplinary collaboration allowed Kuijt, an archaeologist, and Donaruma, a narrative and documentary filmmaker, to provide a more holistic view of the conditions in Ukraine’s built environment.

Walking through the ruins, Kuijt said, revealed more widespread and far more extensive damage than the team anticipated. They also found that the devastation not only exists above ground from missile strikes, but also extends below the surface due to the widespread trench systems used by military forces.

The researchers mapped out the substantial damage incurred by churches and historic buildings from as early as the 11th and 12th centuries. Architectural monuments and UNESCO-listed heritage sites — even those that have appeared fairly intact in satellite imagery — have also suffered.

“Beyond the destruction and damage, particularly in populated, civilian areas, we were astonished to see the amount of preparation and defense of cultural heritage sites and objects,” Donaruma said. “Large sheets of metal covered stained-glass windows. Fortified cages covered statues, and museums were boxing artifacts for storage.”

For every church the researchers found in similar condition, Kuijt estimated there are three to four other archaeological sites below ground that are also impacted.

Despite modern military advancements such as satellites, drones and tanks, much of the war in Ukraine is reliant on trenches and bunkers — which has resulted in digging and tunneling through the ground, often underneath or right up to the foundations of crucial heritage sites. This has likely destroyed thousands of archaeological spaces, according to Kuijt, including medieval cemeteries and Bronze Age settlements.

This first hit home for Kuijt and Donaruma when visiting a previously unknown graveyard near St. George Chapel in Oster. There, team members discovered that the trench system had exposed the foundations of the 11th-century church and portions of the cemetery associated with it.

Further explorations revealed that other burial mounds and cemetery sites in the region have been affected by both missile strikes and underground trench systems, including one of the largest 11th-century necropolises in Ukraine.

The region has played a key role throughout human history, Kuijt said, as a crossroads of ancient people, culture, religion, language and literature for thousands of years.

“Some of our best understanding of Paleolithic and Neolithic times was formed around the Black Sea,” he said. “This is where Bronze Age villagers created structures and villages that traded pottery with people from Turkey, Georgia and other places. Vikings moved through and traded in these areas. The emergence of specific forms of Christianity occurred here, along with the construction of its churches — including ritual and religious life that is unique in this area. So, in many ways, this should be viewed as a global heritage.”

Because the war in Ukraine is ongoing, the researchers know that further destruction is likely, especially in the eastern and southern areas of the country where the most intense battles are currently happening. However, it is critical to begin assessing the damage now, even as it continues to occur, the researchers said.

“There is very much a ticking clock,” Kuijt said. “This is essentially cultural triage. We need to assess which antiquities are the most important and the least damaged, and how we can allocate resources to try to protect those as best we can.”

While they anticipate that it may be five to 10 years before archaeologists will be able to truly sort out how much damage has taken place, Kuijt and Donaruma are hopeful their work will help to begin documenting all that the Ukrainian people have lost — and to prevent or minimize the ongoing devastation.

“Ian and I are both longing to return to Ukraine to continue our work with Ukrainian archeologists and students to keep the world apprised of the war and impact it has on lives and cultural heritage,” Donaruma said. “We have made so many friends in Ukraine in a short period of time that our passion to help and continue this work is of the utmost importance.”

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958, tdestazi@nd.edu

Contact: Carrie Gates, associate director of media relations, 574-631-4313, c.gates@nd.edu

Originally published by Tracy DeStazio and Carrie Gates at news.nd.edu on December 13, 2023.

In his home country of Bangladesh, Khan was an army officer stationed along the Myanmar border. He served as a United Nations peacekeeper in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the country’s historic 2006 election — its first free election in 40-plus years. Khan’s academic career has included graduate studies and teaching positions in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the United States.

“I was always a peacemaker in my mind, but it took this journey for me to come to anthropology and peace-and-justice studies,” said Khan, who earned his Ph.D. in peace studies and anthropology from Notre Dame in 2023 and is now a postdoctoral teaching scholar at the Center for Social Concerns.

The spark for Khan’s journey came from encounters he had with Rohingya refugees while he was serving in Bangladesh’s Border Guard more than 15 years ago. He saw members of the Muslim minority group fleeing persecution in Myanmar and moving in huge numbers across the border into Bangladesh. The UN Human Rights Council’s largest refugee camps for the Rohingya were in the area that Khan was responsible for as a major with the Border Guard.

“The Rohingya would talk to me about their persecution, but more than that they used to talk about the hopes they had for the future,” he said. “That’s very interesting because perhaps the immediate impression is that this is the most persecuted community in the world. That is actually a term that the United Nations used to describe the Rohingya.”

Khan began to turn over anthropological questions in his mind. How do human beings survive injustice and go on to thrive? How do they maintain their culture when they move to a dramatically different place? What impact do immigrants have on their new communities?

Khan left Bangladesh in 2015 to study at the University of Edinburgh, where he received a prestigious Chevening Scholarship from the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office and earned a master’s degree in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies. Then he received a Flanders Master Mind Scholarship to study at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where he earned a master’s degree in social and cultural anthropology with a research focus on Muslim immigrants in Brussels.

He received a Notre Dame Presidential Fellowship to pursue his Ph.D. at Notre Dame, which gave him the opportunity to study in both the Department of Anthropology and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

His move to the American Midwest also brought him close to three growing Rohingya communities in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Fort Wayne. His doctoral dissertation looked at the well-being of those communities with a focus on the notions of trust and hope.

“I’ve done my Ph.D. in the West, but I’ve worked with people who came from elsewhere,” Khan said. “Eventually my Ph.D. came to be a study of cultural interaction — how people of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Fort Wayne engage with the Rohingya as much as how the Rohingya interact with them.”

Khan was a member of the Center for Social Concerns’ inaugural cohort of Graduate Justice Fellows in 2022-23, the final year of his Ph.D. program. He then returned to the Center as a postdoctoral teaching scholar for the 2023-24 academic year.

This semester he’s teaching a course, Everyday Justice, that adopts an anthropological perspective to introduce students to the cultural contexts of justice that speak to people’s everyday experiences. The course encourages students to look at how issues of justice in education, health, work, environment, and other areas affect people on an individual level and how those individual experiences connect to larger policy questions.

“I believe anthropologists are uniquely placed to make connections between this humanistic discipline and get us closer to understanding contemporary societies through the lenses of peace and justice,” Khan said. “You can study humans while at the same time also studying the environment and see how much of that is just and how much isn’t.”

Another project he’s taken on at the Center for Social Concerns is the Community Engagement Case Archive. The archive will be a collection of perceived real-life scenarios about students’ relationships with new people, managing differences, and navigating ethical dilemmas, among other challenges. The project’s goal is to enhance students’ preparation for working in places and communities that are new to them.

“Students will be able to read these narratives, think through the situations, and learn from them before they embed themselves in a new community and face different forms of justice and injustice — individually and institutionally,” Khan said.

After this academic year is complete, Khan will move on from Notre Dame to a faculty position with Georgetown University’s Justice & Peace Studies Program.

“That’s where I am now — soldier turned peacekeeper turned anthropologist turned peace-and-justice enthusiast,” Khan said. “Peace is worth nothing if it is not just.”

Originally published at socialconcerns.nd.edu. 

Originally published by socialconcerns.nd.edu at kroc.nd.edu on April 22, 2024.

Even with important strides in addressing health issues across the globe, men have not benefited equally compared to women. Men’s life expectancies have not grown as steadily as women’s over the past few decades, and they are expected to live about five years less than women, according to 2021 global health data from the Human Mortality Database and the United Nations’ World Population Prospects. The discrepancy in life expectancy between men and women persists in places all over the world, and is even growing in other places.

At a time when health resources are at a premium and need to be wisely allocated, health professionals must find points within men’s lives when it makes the most sense to intervene and advocate for preventive care for promoting better health outcomes. Life transitions such as marriage and fatherhood are often pivotal and crucial intervention points — and men often experience long-term health benefits from those family roles, with lower mortality risks than single men without children. But just like every man is different, health concerns across global communities differ as well.

Research from the University of Notre Dame finds that not all life transitions produce the same health results, and not all men’s global health policies should look the same from one country to another.

In most contexts in the United States and Europe, men tend to experience physical health changes when they get married and start having a family. These changes include an increase in waist circumference and body mass index — a phenomenon known as the “dad bod,” explained Lee Gettler, associate professor of anthropology and chair of Notre Dame’s Department of Anthropology.

But Gettler’s research found that this phenomenon actually differs across societies. His study, recently published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, used a large longitudinal dataset from the Philippines to explore how men’s physical health changed across transitions to either marriage or cohabitation and fatherhood. His and his co-authors’ findings present a different picture of Filipino men’s health as it relates to these major transitions, compared to what is commonly seen in the U.S. and Europe.

Gettler worked with scientists from the University of Michigan, Northwestern University and the University of San Carlos in Cebu City, Philippines, to conduct and compile the research.

“Our research shows that the links between physical health with marriage and fatherhood are different for Filipino men in Cebu than they are in places like the United States or Europe,” said Gettler, who is also director of Notre Dame’s Hormones, Health and Human Behavior Lab and faculty affiliate with the Eck Institute for Global Health.

Gettler and his fellow researchers collected socio-demographic, health, behavioral and testosterone data from a long-running birth cohort study of Filipino men at ages 21, 26 and 31 (approximately) between 2005 and 2014. The researchers discovered that their group of 607 men fared much better than men in other cultures at the same stages of life.

“We don’t find that the married or cohabitating Filipino men have the same kind of negative health trajectories in terms of their physical well-being compared to the Filipino men who stayed single in our study,” Gettler said. “They are not experiencing deteriorating health, or demonstrating the dad bod, as a consequence of becoming a partner or father.”

The study acknowledged the myriad reasons behind this difference in outcome and said that diet and physical activity, as well as the social dynamics surrounding partnering, could explain such results. In addition, the study revealed that the Cebu men who were stronger and more muscular in their early 20s were more likely to later become partnered in the first place — a pattern the co-authors described as the “marital selection” model.

“Our findings indicate that an emphasis on men’s body composition as they transition to partnering and parenting may be less critical in Cebu and similar contexts,” the researchers wrote, compared to prioritizing other potential men’s health issues at this same stage in life, such as mental health.

“The transition to fatherhood represents a promising developmental period to encourage men to attend to their own health,” continued the co-authors, with the added benefit being overall family health in the long run. But, they cautioned, it is crucial to direct those promotional efforts and resources to the most pressing needs within a specific socio-ecological setting and community.

“In global public health, men’s well-being is often a secondary concern, despite men faring poorly compared to women on multiple dimensions of health across the life course,” Gettler said. “But to help address this gap, we not only need improved strategies and policies, but we also require a more robust understanding of factors that shape mens’ health across diverse contexts.

“This means we cannot simply transport a ‘one size fits all’ policy on men’s health and family life from one context to other settings around the world.”

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Tracy DeStazio at news.nd.edu on April 23, 2024.

Thanks to a major research grant, University of Notre Dame anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman will spend the next three years exploring how exposure to experimental mental health treatments impacts spirituality among secular Americans.

The assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology has been awarded a $370,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation in which she will lead 10 other interdisciplinary researchers to work on the project “Ethical Substance: Psychedelic Medicine in Times of Social and Spiritual Yearning.”

The purpose of the grant is to explore the dynamic of psychedelic-assisted treatment for mental health and how it impacts spirituality in the secular world.

“In the midst of the reports on America’s growing mental health crisis, I was really drawn to the excitement around psychedelics as highly-effective treatments for things like anxiety, PTSD, addiction, and treatment-resistant depression,” Seale-Feldman said. “Maybe you could call it hype, but there's a lot of hope. It feels very hopeful, and that, to me, is exciting — that there is an emergent field of mental health care that might be revolutionary.”

Examining the impact of mystical experiences 

Seale-Feldman, a medical anthropologist whose research specializes in crisis, care, and psychic life, will examine how the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted treatment of mental health issues — specifically through the use of hallucinogens such as psilocybin and ayahuasca — correlates with the presence of mystical experience and how these powerful experiences could transform relationships to spirituality among the non-religious.

“Psychedelics, in general, have always been on the border between the secular and the sacred,” she said. “In non-clinical settings, these substances are also referred to as ‘entheogens,’ and ‘sacred medicines,’ and there is a long history of Indigenous use in both religious and healing practices throughout the Americas. So there's this sense of tension (between the differing interpretations), and I'm really interested in the fact that these substances live on that border.”

Mystical experiences have been written about for hundreds of years by both religious and secularist groups and have been described as a life-changing moment that unifies the divine and dissolves the boundaries of ego. Seale-Feldman said researchers have found this experience to be key in psychedelic treatment efficacy, and she is curious about the after-effects.

“The focus of the project is really on this question of the incorporation of mystical experiences into the lives of secular Americans and their therapeutic practices,’” Seale-Feldman said. “And we’re exploring what the impact of this might be in times of social and spiritual crisis.”

Advancing research with interdisciplinary work

Seale-Feldman is now leading a team of scholars — who specialize in anthropology, psychiatry, clinical psychology, philosophy, theology, and religious studies — to conduct and analyze research at four field sites over three years. The sites include a clinical trial for psilocybin-assisted palliative care, psychedelic churches, a psychedelic-therapy training program, and psychedelic science conferences.

“The focus of the project is really on this question of the incorporation of mystical experiences into the lives of secular Americans and their therapeutic practices. And we’re exploring what the impact of this might be in times of social and spiritual crisis.”

By the end, she said, their work will result in a number of published articles, an ethnographic book manuscript, podcast episodes, and a public workshop at the renowned retreat center Esalen Institute in California.

Both mental health and psychedelics have been marred by cultural taboos and stigma, but Seale-Feldman said this grant signals a shift in public perception of the topics.

“Given the state of mental health in the U.S. right now, I think we need to be as open-minded as possible in exploring a wide range of pathways towards healing,” she said. “And to also ask how the resurgence of interest in psychedelic medicine might impact people's lives beyond the area of mental health and into domains related to spirituality and meaning.”

Seale-Feldman is excited to approach this research through an anthropological lens and work with experts across interdisciplinary disciplines. The hope, she said, is that their findings will contribute to the current research dialogue, which has been primarily dictated by a psychiatric approach.

“I think it’s a really exciting new direction,” Seale-Feldman said. “There’s a lot of hype and narrative surrounding the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance,’ so I’m hoping this research can be a kind of empirical study of that — to explore the impacts these experiences have on people and how psychedelic medicine could reconfigure our whole way of thinking about mental health care.”

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on March 27, 2024.

Vox: The fight over plagiarism is the harbinger of a messy new era

Aidan Seale-Feldman knows a thing or two about what it’s like to witness a disaster. She was working in Nepal in 2015 when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck the central region of the country, followed by a 7.3-magnitude aftershock, both of which claimed the lives of more than 9,000 people in total once the ground had ceased heaving and the dust had finally settled. The event changed her life — and her work — forever.

Disasters, both natural and humanitarian, are all around us. How we as humans process tragedy and survive all that suffering — and find ways to continue moving forward — is worth studying.

For Seale-Feldman, an assistant professor and a medical and psychological anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, providing the right kind of care for victims of disaster is crucial. She finds insight by studying the diverse ways humans respond to catastrophe and loss, and how those responses are shaped by cultural, social and political factors. Understanding those differences reveals not only why we react the way we do when something awful happens, but also informs how to genuinely and compassionately help those in the middle of a crisis, whatever it may be and wherever they may be.

Our ability to cope with disaster depends on our well-being, resources

When a disaster strikes, Seale-Feldman says, an immediate disorientation can develop in multiple directions — the severity and manifestation of which depends on a person’s well-being and level of social support prior to the disaster, as well as one’s personal and cultural resources in the management of that loss.

“It is certain that those who are in precarious situations, or who were already struggling with feelings of hopelessness, sadness, excessive worry or substance use prior to a disaster, will be more vulnerable to increased distress,” Seale-Feldman explained.

Knowing someone’s history and ability to cope with tragedy sets the stage for what mental health resources they may need.

‘The world is like this’: How different cultures, belief systems deal with disaster

It is important to remember that people from different cultures and belief backgrounds respond to loss differently after a disaster, Seale-Feldman said. She offered the example of the earthquake in Nepal, where she had been working on research on the translation of affliction between Indigenous and psychiatric worlds when the quake hit. The 2015 event helped her to discover that not all cultures see disaster in the same way. In Nepal, a place shaped by Hindu and Buddhist values, many people spoke of suffering as simply the reality of the world we live in.

“They would tell me, ‘The world is like this,’” Seale-Feldman said. “Basically, that life is a constant oscillation between suffering and contentment, misery and joy — everything is impermanent.”

These different human responses to moments of tragedy may also require different approaches to healing. “Not all psychosocial counseling or humanitarian efforts fit every culture or person in the wake of a disaster,” Seale-Feldman said.

For example, there is an idea in Western medicine that talking about loss and expressing negative emotions is necessary for healing. In Nepal, however, “there is a sense that to talk about those who died a bad death (in an accident or before one’s time) can strengthen the attachments between the living and the dead, making it harder for the dead to achieve either rebirth into the next life or liberation from the world,” Seale-Feldman said.

Something she learned from her experience in Nepal was that trained counselors have to find new ways to help those working with loss — in particular, learning healing techniques that may be different from what they have been taught as common practice in their field.

Two ways to offer care emerge

Seale-Feldman refers to the words of Dean Spade, a professor at the Seattle University School of Law, in his book “Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next),” where he argues that there are two main forms of care that emerge in the wake of a disaster: charity and mutual aid.

“Humanitarianism, a form of charity, relies on a hierarchical model in which those with resources decide who is deserving of aid and in what form, while mutual aid involves a nonhierarchical effort of collective coordination to meet each other’s needs,” Seale-Feldman explained.

One of the major issues in humanitarianism is that care is allocated based on “victim status,” Seale-Feldman said, “such that anyone who is not eligible as a victim based on predetermined criteria will be excluded from receiving aid, even if they may be suffering due to other issues.”

Mutual aid, however, offers a different form of care that sees all those involved as eligible sufferers in need of equal and adequate attention.

According to Seale-Feldman, beyond these two models, there are also smaller forms of care that emerge in the aftermath that are important to acknowledge and focus on, such as “the risks undertaken by some to help others, acts of kindness and generosity, and interactions marked by gentleness between people.”

These modes of assistance are what Seale-Feldman strives to illuminate in her own work.

How can we help better, for longer?

Seale-Feldman said that sustainability is one of the biggest problems with humanitarian efforts in terms of bringing access to mental health and psychosocial counseling to countries where mental health had not been incorporated into the public health care system.

“One thing I think humanitarians must ask is, ‘What are the ethics of giving care post-disaster, only to take it away once the disaster has been deemed over and all immediate effects have subsided?’ These finite programs make us think to ourselves, ‘What happens after that?’”

One response to this issue of sustainability has been an increasing effort to actually construct more permanent and inclusive mental health systems in times of emergency.

Is it possible to mentally and socially prepare for a disaster?

Regardless of where a disaster takes place in the world, there are some questions to be asked and lessons to be learned. “Disasters call on us to question the current state of affairs, to ask how it is that such a thing has happened and to critically rethink how we should be living — both in relation to each other and on a rapidly changing planet,” Seale-Feldman pointed out. “Disasters often provide a momentary opening for certain things to change.

“At a very immediate level, social support always plays a crucial role in the aftermath of a disaster. If we have strong social support networks in place, this will be very beneficial and protective — and not only in times of crisis.”

In part, this may mean building up mental health support services into current public health care systems — and being mindful of what those will look like, culturally and socially, depending on the community they are serving.

“The question is, how can we sustain this concern for others and these forms of community in life beyond the disaster?” Seale-Feldman asked.

“I think one thing we can do is to actively remember the relationships that are made possible because of the disaster — as well as the acts of care, kindness and solidarity that arise in its wake — with the hope that they might become blueprints for new ways of being and relating to others in the future.”

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Tracy DeStazio at news.nd.edu on December 19, 2023.

There’s learning from books and learning from immersive experiences. And last summer, Alyssa Miulli did the latter.

During an internship in Canada with the Smithsonian Institute, the University of Notre Dame history and anthropology major excavated 500-year-old artifacts of Basque mariners from France and Spain who built camps on an island while they hunted whales.

“Carbon dating of wood planks can give insight into a specific time range for whale hunting, the structure of the site may show what components of life were on land versus on the whaling vessels, and artifacts — such as leather shoes, a stone wall, and painted ceramics — can give a glimpse into domestic life,” Miulli said.

In addition to unearthing and inventorying roof tiles, flint, and cooking pots in Bonne-Espérance, Quebec, the junior immersed herself in the culture by eating seal meat, befriending locals, and making a short film about the region.

“For me, anthropology brings a distinctly human side to history,” said the Glynn Family Honors Program scholar.

Exhausting, precise, and rewarding

Miulli fell in love with anthropology during her University Seminar — Human Impact and the Environment: Past, Present & Future, taught by associate professor Donna Glowacki.

In the first-year class, she was encouraged to think deeply about anthropology in relation to the environment. She also appreciated Glowacki’s support during the Snite Museum of Art’s annual essay competition — which she won with “A Boy with Burdens: Analyzing Themes of Colonialism and Environmentalism in the Art of Yinka Shonibare.”

Eric Haanstad, associate professor of the practice and director of undergraduate studies in anthropology, pointed the president of the student-run Anthropology Club toward the summer internship led by Smithsonian senior scientist Bill Fitzhugh.

For more than 40 years, Fitzhugh has studied Arctic peoples and cultures. He previously excavated sites of Indigenous Innu and Inuit peoples on Quebec’s Lower North Shore, and Miulli was fascinated with his application of cross-cultural lenses to archaeology.

“I applied to this internship to see how the Innu, Inuit, and Basque cultures may have collided and influenced each other's way of life,” Miulli said.

Coming to appreciate the value of archaeological work was her favorite part of the experience. The team sometimes needed as many as three days to dig a 2-meter-by-1-meter unit, after which they inventoried artifacts and did a scale drawing for documentation.

“To put it plainly, archaeology is not easy. It is physically exhausting, tedious, and precise,” she said. 

“However, it is rewarding to know that attention to detail and care for your work are essential. Every small action matters to formulate a better understanding of the culture and time period that the artifacts represent.”

Crowberry bushes and sandy beaches

The West Chicago native described the fog-shrouded Canadian island landscape as almost otherworldly.

“While St. Paul River [on the mainland] had rolling rock formations and sandy beaches, Bonne-Espérance was covered in a thick layer of moss with crowberry bushes and bakeapple plants ripening up for harvest season,” she said.

Each morning, a resident family of minks greeted the researchers when they arrived by boat; the team stayed nights in St. Paul River, about 4 miles away on the mainland.

People in St. Paul River also warmly welcomed the researchers. Locals invited them to engage with the culture, including eating at a restaurant where mummers — actors wearing disguises — performed.

Miulli enjoyed regional delicacies such as bakeapple cheesecake, seal meat, and fisherman’s brewis, which is made with salted cod fish, hard bread, onions, and scrunchions.

Late into the internship, officials with the Whiteley Museum of St. Paul River — which hosted the team — requested that it make a film about the dig and the region.

So Miulli — an actor, assistant director, and social media coordinator with Notre Dame’s Not-So-Royal-Shakespeare Co. — took action.

With creative freedom, an iPhone, and three weeks’ time, she interviewed Fitzhugh and locals and shot b-roll for the film.

“A small project for the Whiteley Museum turned into a passion project that acted as a catalyst for what I hope to do in the future with anthropology and film,” Miulli said. “Interviews and ethnographic films are the most valuable resources to produce in order to represent subcultures that may be overlooked in our rapidly changing world.”

How it started, how it’s going

Miulli has also studied other cultures and areas of the world during her undergraduate career.

She has assisted Glowacki with The Far View Archeological Project — a collaboration between Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado and Notre Dame that examines ancestral Puebloan villages.

And, she’s helped anthropology professor Susan Blum with the School Stories Lab, which gathers accounts from people worldwide about their “joys and fears, triumphs and shame, friendships and loneliness, curiosity and boredom, and everything else that accompanies the experience of school.”

During the fall semester, Miulli studied abroad at St. Andrews University in Scotland.

The first-generation college student chose St. Andrews for its exceptional academic culture that prioritizes individual humanities research, as well as its extensive musical theater community.

Miulli said she didn’t choose Notre Dame, though. It was more like the University chose her.

“Notre Dame provided everything that I wanted in my future: faith, community, academic rigor, and endless opportunity,” said Miulli, who plans to pursue a Ph.D.

“I am grateful every day to call the Golden Dome my home.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on December 13, 2023.

Humans invest enormous amounts of time and energy in bringing up babies. This unique investment is a

 fundamental part of what it means to be human. In this episode, the second in a three-part series on family relationships, researchers Lee Gettler, Stacy Rosenbaum, and Sonny Bechayda explore how our species' approach to fatherhood may have shaped some of the most important traits that set us apart from other mammals.