Notre Dame Rome, in partnership with the Graduate School and the Center for Italian Studies, is pleased to announce the 2025-2026 cohort of Rome Graduate Research Fellows. This prestigious fellowship supports advanced Humanities, Social Sciences and Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering PhD students as they pursue dissertation research in Rome. The residential program is designed to foster academic engagement and collaboration within the academic communities of Notre Dame Rome and the city itself.
This year’s fellowship has been awarded to six outstanding studentsand their projects span disciplines such as history, literature, theology, engineering and cultural studies, showcasing the depth and diversity of scholarship at Notre Dame.
Fall 2025 Fellows
Diego Felipe López Aguirre, Ph.D. Candidate in Spanish
Dissertation Title: Inventing the New Granada Kingdom: Lettered Creoles and the Politics of Time in New Granada (XVI-XVIII centuries)
López Aguirre’s research explores how colonial subjects in New Granada used temporal narratives to shape political programs and historical memory. He argues that in the Iberian Early Modern world, the concept of the past was a political tool through which individuals negotiated, refuted, or created policies to address contemporary needs and future aspirations. Aguirre will be researching a series of Kankuamos objects (Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia) collected at the Museo Anima Mundi (Vatican City) and Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte (Napoli) and how pre-Hispanic antiquities circulated in the Italian collections of the Renaissance and Baroque era. At the same time, he will conduct archive research in the Historical Archive of the Propaganda Fide (Rome) and Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain).
Ella Hadacek, Ph.D. Candidate in History
Dissertation Title: Going to Rome: British and American Women’s Conversion to Catholicism, 1840-1930
Hadacek's dissertation, "Going to Rome: British and American Women’s Conversion to Catholicism," explores how Protestant women’s conversions challenge scholarly depiction of Catholic laywomen as pious, passive, and disinterested in the outside world. By exploring the women who exerted their wills both before and after their conversions, she argues that embracing Catholicism afforded these women avenues to agency and authority denied them in their respective nation states. These women saw Roman prelates as allies in clashes with local priests and bishops. However, by the 1910s, the U.S and U.K. Catholic hierarchy aligned more closely with the goals of the Vatican, and Catholic women found less room to negotiate positions of power.
Nicholas Slusher, Ph.D. Candidate in Aerospace Engineering
Dissertation Title: Enhancing Signal-to-Noise Ratios and Flow Applications in Pressure and Temperature Sensitive Paints Through Post-Processing Analysis.
Pressure and temperature-sensitive paints (PSP & TSP) are chemical sensors that can be applied to aerodynamic surfaces to determine local pressure and temperature. These chemical sensors operate by emitting light at predictable wavelengths whose intensity is a function of local physical quantities such as pressure and temperature. Slusher’s research focuses on refining Pressure-Sensitive Paint (PSP) and Temperature-Sensitive Paint (TSP) measurement techniques by implementing data-processing methods such as modal decompositions, filtering, and neural networks. His goal is to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in PSP/TSP measurements, enhancing their accuracy and expanding their potential applications.
Spring 2026 Fellows
Elisa Bisson, Ph.D. Candidate in Italian Studies
Dissertation Title: Reading the Comedy as an encyclopedic treatise: diagrams, illumination and indexes in the early reception (1320-1350)
Bisson’s dissertation explores Dante’s Comedy as a cultural landmark that contributed to the transition from Latin to vernacular education in the Middle Ages. She examines the ways in which fourteenth-century commentators incorporated diagrams into their analyses, demonstrating how they interpreted The Divine Comedy as a didactic work with multidisciplinary knowledge.
Inha Park, Ph.D. Candidate in Italian Studies
Dissertation Title: Moving Images and Analogical Imagination: Renegotiating National Identities between Italy and Korea during the Cold War (1950-1963)
Park’s research re-examines Italian national identity from a transnational perspective by analyzing the cultural exchanges between Italy and South Korea during and after the Korean War. She investigates how Italian and Korean cultural products influenced the reshaping of postwar Italy and wartime South Korea.
Noelle Johnson, Ph.D. Candidate in Theology
Dissertation Title: And Her Almsgiving Raised Up Her Children: Charity Theology and the Versional History of Greek Proverbs
Johnson’s dissertation examines the Greek translation (Septuagint) of the Book of Proverbs and its relationship to the Hebrew text. She highlights how scholarly perspectives on this book have lagged behind developments in the study of other Septuagint books. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls created a new paradigm for study of the Septuagint in the second half of the twentieth century. She argues for a renewed approach to Greek Proverbs informed by this conceptual shift in Biblical Studies.
Fostering Academic Excellence in Rome
The Notre Dame Rome Graduate Research Fellowship continues to serve as a crucial platform for fostering research in the Eternal City. By supporting in-depth, field-specific inquiry, this program not only advances individual projects but also enriches the broader academic community.
Learn more about the Graduate research fellowship here.
Originally published by at rome.nd.edu on March 26, 2025.