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 at al.nd.edu on October 27, 2025.