Art and the Museum as Instruments of Hope

Experience the Event

Presented by The Office of the President

As part of the Sesquicentennial Celebration of the University of Notre Dame Art Museum, join us for an inspiring conversation exploring the intersections of the arts, faith, history, and education, and the role of the museum in contemporary life.

The discussion between Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, and Heather Hyde Minor, R.L. Canala Professor of Art History at Notre Dame, honors the legacy of connection between the Vatican Museums and campus art museums that began when Notre Dame Founder Rev. Edward F. Sorin, C.S.C., invited Vatican artist Luigi Gregori to campus, forever shaping Notre Dame’s visual identity and giving rise to one of the nation’s oldest and most esteemed university art museums. Examine the Vatican Museums’ global mission and its implications for our own artistic endeavors, and hear insights on art as a source of hope and human connection.

Opening remarks are provided by University of Notre Dame president Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C. This Notre Dame Forum event was co-sponsored by the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.

To read a recap of the event, click here.

Since its establishment in 2005, each year the Notre Dame Forum invites campus-wide dialogue about issues of importance to the University, the nation, and the larger world.

This year’s theme is Cultivating Hope. In a world where hope is too often in short supply, our goal is to invite reflection about how each of us can be “seekers of truth, sustainers of hope, and builders of bridges.”

To learn more about the Notre Dame Forum 2025-26, please visit the Forum website.

Meet the Speaker: President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C.

In December 2023, the University’s Board of Trustees elected Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., as Notre Dame’s 18th president, effective June 1, 2024. He also serves as professor of political science. Prior to serving as president, he was vice president and associate provost for interdisciplinary initiatives.

In his role as vice president and associate provost, he oversaw the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, iNDustry Labs, the Institute for Educational Initiatives, the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, the McGrath Institute for Church Life, the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center, the Office of Military and Veterans Affairs, the ROTC programs, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. He also directed the approval and review process of institutes and centers more generally.

Father Dowd was previously an assistant provost for internationalization with Notre Dame International, where his primary responsibilities included leadership of the Dublin Global Gateway, Kylemore Abbey Global Centre, and the São Paulo Global Center along with planning for future engagement with Africa.

The author of the book Christianity, Islam, and Liberal Democracy: Lessons from sub-Saharan Africa, Father Dowd focuses his research on African politics, ethnic politics, and the relationship between religion, political institutions, national identity, and human development. His current research explores religion and the integration of migrants/refugees in Europe and North America and the effects of faith-based schools on citizenship and civic engagement in Africa.

He is the founder of Notre Dame’s Ford Program in Human Development Studies and Solidarity and a fellow of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies in the University’s Keough School of Global Affairs.

A Notre Dame alum, Father Dowd earned an M.Div. from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and was ordained a Holy Cross priest in 1994. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from UCLA.

Meet the Speaker: Barbara Jatta

Barbara Jatta was born in Rome in October 1962, has been married to Fabio Midulla since July 1988, and has three children: Marco, Fabiola and Giorgio. She obtained a degree in Letters, with a thesis on the History of drawing, engraving and graphics, in 1986 from the “La Sapienza” University of Rome, and concluded a three-year specialist course in History of Art at the same institution in 1991. She undertook several specialist internships in England, Portugal and the United States.

From 1981 to 1996 she collaborated with the National Institute for Graphic Design, working first as a restorer of graphic materials and then on the cataloguing of the Institute’s portfolios of drawings, engravings, woodcuts and lithographs. Since the 1990s, she has taught at various institutions and on specialist courses.

From 1994 to 2016, she ran the course on the history of techniques and graphic arts at the Faculty of Letters at the “Suor Orsola Benincasa” University of Naples, where she also serves as a member of the managing board of the Pagliara Foundation.

From 1996 to 2016, she was the director of the Cabinet of Prints at the Vatican Apostolic Library, where she was also a member of the Exhibitions, Accessions, Acquisitions, Publishing and Cataloguing commissions. In 2010, the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI appointed her as Curator of Prints at the Vatican Apostolic Library.

From 2010 to 2016, she was a full member of the International Advisory Committee of Keepers of Public Collections of Graphic Art, the international association of Directors of Cabinets of drawings and prints, and since 2010, she has served as a member of the Scientific Committee of the journal Grafica d’Arte. She has collaborated on and personally organized several exhibitions and has participated in numerous publishing initiatives in the field of the history of graphics and art.

In January 2017, she was appointed by Pope Francis to guide the papal collections in the role of Director of the Vatican Museums. She is a member of many influential councils and leadership groups throughout the global artistic community, including the Scientific Council of the Louvre Museum; the “Bizot Group,” the committee of the directors of some of the most prominent global museums; the International Advisory Board of the Hermitage Museum; and the Scientific Committee of the Bulletin of the Central Institute for Restoration.

For her leadership, she has received many honorary appointments, including being named to the Order of “Stella d’Italia,” the Royal Order of the Polar Star, and being named an Officer of the Order of the Arts and the Letters and as Chevalier in the Order of the Legion of Honor.

In 2023, Pope Francis appointed her as a consultant of the Holy See’s Dicastery for Culture and Education.

Meet the Faculty: Heather Hyde Minor

Heather Hyde Minor specializes in the artistic and intellectual culture of early modern Italy. From 2017-2020 she served as the academic director of ND Rome. Her research interests include architecture, print culture, and the study of antiquities.

She is the author or editor of five books. The first, The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), won the Howard Marraro Prize and the honorable mention for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. The second, Piranesi’s Lost Words, examined Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s famous printed images alongside the texts he designed to go with them (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). She edited Piranesi: Testi teoretici e polemici, the third volume of the Edizione nazionale dei testi delle Opere di Giovanni Battista Piranesi (De Luca, 2026) and co-edited The Serpent and the Stylus: Essays on G.B. Piranesi (University of Michigan Press, 2006).

Her newest book, Piranesi Unbound, co-authored with Carolyn Yerkes, was brought out in 2020 by Princeton University Press. “Piranesi on the Page,” an exhibition they co-curated was on view at Princeton University in 2021.

Support for her research has come from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

Together with colleagues at Stanford and Princeton, she organizes the Rome Archive Seminar, a funded opportunity for graduate students who want to learn how to use the Roman archives and libraries for their doctoral research: https://rome.nd.edu/research/projects-activities/rome-seminar/

She is currently at work on a biography of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, co-editing a volume on printed maps of Rome from the fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuries, and a study of ancient material objects and historical doubt in the 1700s.