2026-27 Dissertation Research Fellowships at Notre Dame Rome
The Graduate School in partnership with Notre Dame Global and the Center for Italian Studies is offering semester- and year-long dissertation research fellowships at Notre Dame Rome to advanced PhD candidates enrolled in any department of the College of Arts & Letters or the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering.
Name and Program: Victoria Basulto, PhD History
Semester: Year Long
Dissertation title and Abstract: A Cold War Cristiada: Militancy, Masculinity, and Morality in Conservative Mexican Catholicism, 1937–1992
The dissertation examines how conservative Mexican Catholics interpreted the Cold War (1945-1991) as a continuation of the Cristero War (1926–1929), framing their struggle against communism as an unfinished religious conflict. The Cristero War, a violent confrontation between Catholic laity and the Mexican state over the latter’s anticlerical policies, formally ended with the Vatican-negotiated Modus Vivendi, reached largely without the input of the Cristeros themselves. I argue that this unresolved ending left enduring wounds that shaped Mexican Catholic political culture well into the late twentieth century. By combining Mexican archival materials with Vatican sources, my dissertation will offer a novel contribution to the historiography of the era by situating Mexican Catholic history within broader global Catholic frameworks.
Name and Program: William O'Brien. PhD-Peace Studies and History
Semester: Fall 2026
Dissertation title and Abstract: The Making of a Monarchy: Conflict, Coloniality, Capitalism, and the Sanūsīs of Libya, 1837 - 1969
On November 21, 1949, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 289 (IV) “Question of the disposal of the former Italian colonies”, which recommended that “Libya, comprising Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and the Fezzan, shall be constituted an independent and sovereign State.” Pursuant to the resolution, on December 24, 1951, the United Kingdom of Libya declared itself an independent constitutional monarchy. After nearly thirty years in exile in Egypt, Muhammad Idris bin Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanūsī returned to his homeland to be crowned king and lead the newly independent nation, adopting the moniker King Idris I. My work blends religious, political, and economic history to investigate the impact of the Sanūsī’s leadership on North Africa and the Mediterranean world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From their founding as a Sufi brotherhood in 1837 through their exile by Muammar Gaddafi in 1969, my research analyzes how the Sanūsī family experienced conflict, colonialism, and development.
Name and Program: Giulia Gliozzi. PhD-Italian Studies
Semester: Year long
Dissertation title and Abstract: Canon and Exclusion: Women’s Holocaust Writing and the Making of Postwar Cultural Memory
The dissertation investigates the editorial history, literary reception, and subsequent marginalization of Holocaust testimonies written by Italian women between 1945 and 1955. By focusing on texts that were published in the immediate postwar years yet rapidly sidelined - or excluded altogether - from the literary canon, the project examines how cultural legitimacy and collective memory were negotiated in Italy after World War II. Rather than treating women’s writing as a compensatory or parallel corpus, the dissertation approaches the canon as a historically contingent system shaped by symbolic capital, editorial mediation, and postwar mnemonic regimes, asking how institutional structures governed both inclusion and exclusion. Ultimately, the dissertation seeks not merely to recover forgotten texts, but to expose the institutional logic through which women’s Holocaust testimonies were rendered marginal within Italy’s postwar literary field.
Name and Program: Matthew Klem. PhD-Theology
Semester: Fall 2026
Dissertation title and Abstract: The Gospel of Mark as a Cultic Book
This dissertation studies the use of written texts within hero cults in ancient Greece, the worship of human beings who are deified after their deaths. I reconstruct groups in ancient Greece who conduct both writing and ritual practices by integrating material remains, like monumental architecture, inscriptions, and art, with literary sources to demonstrate the use of texts in the worship of four heroes: the poet Archilochus, the philosopher Epicurus, the healer Asclepius, and Jesus Christ. A first-century CE follower of Christ, whom we call Mark, wrote a biography of Jesus Christ, telling how he was empowered at his baptism, taught disciples, healed multitudes, offended the authorities with his parables, and was crucified, but was vindicated by the god of Israel. Recent scholarship on the Gospel of Mark claims that it was not read during gatherings of Christ-followers in the earliest period and that it performed religious functions starting only in the second century CE. I argue, based on a comparison with other hero cults, that Mark was plausibly read at ritual meetings of Christ-followers in its earliest reception.