Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism

Dear friends,

Founded in 1975, the University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism is widely recognized as the leading center for the historical study of Roman Catholicism in the United States. Cushwa Center seminars, conferences, research projects, and publications engage a national body of scholars. In all its undertakings—instruction, research, publication, and mentorship—the center brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to interpret the American Catholic past and bring that history to bear on contemporary questions in public life and the U.S. Catholic Church.

Recent collaborative projects undertaken at the Cushwa Center have included a multi-year study of the global reception of the Second Vatican Council, which resulted in the volume Catholics in the Vatican II Era: Local Histories of a Global Event (Cambridge, 2017). From 2020 to 2022, the research project “Gender, Sex, and Power,” brought together a working group of scholars to develop a more adequate historical accounting of clerical sexual abuse in the United States.

Learn more about our work below, or, to keep up on the latest from Cushwa, please sign up for our semi-annual American Catholic Studies Newsletter.

Kathleen Sprows Cummings

William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Director

University of Notre Dame