Humanities
At the core of Notre Dame’s identity as a leading global Catholic research university is a deep commitment to excellence in the humanities and the liberal arts. In a time when many institutions are divesting from these disciplines, we are uniquely positioned to lead.
The humanities remain central to Notre Dame because of their importance for understanding truth, beauty, and the human condition, and their centrality to Catholic intellectual life. Exposing students to theological and ethical questions, training students in foreign languages and cultures, exploring the moral complexity of the past, and encouraging encounters with great art and literature are fundamental, not optional, for a Catholic liberal arts education. More pragmatically, some of the University’s strongest departments, programs, and library collections are in these areas, and investments with one eye toward collaboration across the University can strengthen the whole.
Status Update
The 2025-26 academic year was the first year of the Franco Family Institute for the Liberal Arts and the Public Good, a transformed research institute. Formerly the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA), the Franco Institute expanded its mission to serve as a humanities center and advocate for the public life of the humanities and liberal arts.
The Franco Institute welcomed its inaugural cohort of humanities fellows, its first cohort of undergraduate public humanities interns, and awarded more than 300 grants to faculty and students across the fall and spring semesters. The Institute partnered with three other initiatives to bring humanities research to interdisciplinary topics, awarding projects in the Arts, Sustainability, and Global Catholic Research through its signature Research Innovation Collaboratives program.
The year’s research theme was “attention,” fostering a lively campus conversation through public events and 19 supported research projects. Working with the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, the Creative Writing Program, and the Arts Initiative, the Franco Institute supported public events with New York Times art critic Jason Farago and Macarthur “genius” winner N. K. Jemisin, and in April hosted the inaugural Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton Culture and the Public Good symposium, featuring Rainn Wilson, Jenny Odell, Vauhini Vara, and Shankar Vedantam.
