In addition to my roles as teacher and scholar, I have been involved in various aspects of university administration for more than two decades.  I enjoy the creative challenges of academic leadership: daily administration, recruiting and hiring, budgeting, and working with donors. Between 1997 and 2002, I was Chair of a large political science department at Notre Dame, a period in which the department had the largest number of students in the College of Arts & Letters and made 18 new faculty appointments. From 2002 to 2018, I was Director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, a campus-wide institute for European scholarship and teaching in the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. Over these years, we laid the foundations for a wide array of innovative programs for students and faculty. Among these activities, I am proud to say that the Nanovic Institute regularly sent about 150 students per year to Europe to conduct independent research, learn languages, and take part in internships.  If universities aren’t first and foremost about students, they aren’t universities.

I am also actively engaged in building Notre Dame’s relationships with the Catholic universities of post-Soviet regions, including those in Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, and Georgia.

Photo:  With Bob Nanovic, founder of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies