Finding Friendship

Fr. Nate Wills, C.S.C., Ph.D., Ryan Family ACE Professorship; Faculty, Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program; Director, Blended Learning Initiatives, University of Notre Dame

Rev. Nathan Wills, C.S.C., serves on the faculty of the Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program and is the director of the Higher-Powered Learning program in Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education. A native of St. Paul, Minnesota, Father Nate has served as a Holy Cross priest in a variety of ministries including parish work, teaching high school, and seminary formation. He completed his M.Div. and M.Ed. at the University of Notre Dame and his doctorate in Educational Leadership and Policy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying technology policy in K-12 Catholic schools. He is currently the priest-in-residence in Keough Hall and the chaplain to the Notre Dame football team.

April Garcia ’05 serves as an assistant teaching professor in the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame. April graduated from Notre Dame with a Bachelor of Business Administration in management consulting. She earned her Master of Education degree from ACE’s Teaching Fellows Program while teaching in San Antonio, where she remained in the classroom for several years. She then began her work as a teacher and leader in South Los Angeles while completing her Master of Arts degree from ACE’s Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program. Her research led to her role as the founding director of Onward Readers, a toddler through middle school literacy initiative through the Department of Catholic Schools and the Smet Foundation. She recently completed her Doctor of Education through the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

Fr. Haake, C.S.C. ‘99, ’06 M.Div., works on the intersection of literature, politics, and religion in sixteenth-century France. His current research focuses on the image of the stranger and how its use––and the reaction to it––helped to form and shape French identity in the early modern period and beyond. Poets, authors, and polemicists took advantage of this particular image to incite a nascent xenophobia, but it was also an opportunity for solidarity or as a political tool to help define and refine cultural and religious identity. He maintains an interest in lyric poetry, namely that of Joachim Du Bellay and Maurice Scève.