Ave Maria University

Professor Spotlight: Dr. Seana Sugrue

Political Economy and Government, a truly exciting new major, brings together the disciplines of politics and economics to explore their mutually supportive dimensions.  It provides students, as aspiring policy-makers, with the ability to understand the importance of institutions in shaping public policy as well as the sometimes agonizing trade-offs involved in responsible decision-making.  Be it the nation’s debt crisis, health care reform, immigration policy, or proposed K-12 educational initiatives, the study of the intersection of government and economics is essential to any sensible and meaningful public policy.  This study is also at the very heart of philosophical inquiry into the nature of man and society, for as Aristotle noted, “politics uses the rest of the sciences, and … the end of this science… must be the good for man.” 

Dr. Seana Sugrue, who teaches a number of courses in the PEG major, is passionate about the study of institutions and the ways in which they interact to sustain or undermine one another.  It is from this vantage point that she

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Professor Spotlight: Dr. James Peliska

Even the casual follower of academic science and industry R&D will recognize that most areas of scientific inquiry are quickly becoming interdisciplinary in nature. The reason for this is both simple and exciting. Technology and broad experimental proficiency have allowed the scientist to start asking bigger, more complex questions. The tools of molecular biology and genetics are helping introduce new innovations to the fields of chemistry, ecology, archeology, and even physics, to name a few. Importantly, this transforming principle goes both ways. The tools and principles of chemistry are quickly becoming an integral part of modern biology. Historically, the fields of chemistry and biology were considered distinct disciplines, each applying its own technology and methods to solve problems within their own field of study. The boundaries between the chemical and biological sciences are rapidly dissolving as scientists increasingly use chemical tools and concepts to explore mechanism, structure and function in complex biological systems at the biochemical, genetic and organismal level.

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Professor Spotlight: Dr. Gabriel Martinez

The new major in Global Affairs and International Business gives students the intellectual foundation to think about global interactions.  The program coordinator, Dr. Gabriel Martinez, is an economist specializing on global economic interactions, particularly the effect of the quality of institutions on living standards across countries.

We know that we live a “globalized” world, in which interactions with other countries are inescapable.  “Globalization” is not just a political phenomenon, or an economic phenomenon, or a cultural phenomenon: it affects the very fabric of our lives, and it does so in a million directions.  Not only do we need to know about it, we need to have the intellectual foundation with which to think about interactions that span the planet.  For this reason, a major like Global Affairs and International Business is an attractive complement to a solid liberal education.

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Professor Spotlight: Dr. Catherine Pakaluk

When Catherine Ruth Pakaluk received her Ph.D. in economics in 2010 from Harvard University, it was an easy decision to accept a job offer from Ave Maria University. Besides the evident personal attractions—such as living in a terrific community just a bike-ride away from campus, where it would be easy to raise her six young children, aged 2 to 11—she was attracted to the possibilities that exist for academic work in a genuinely Catholic university. “At AMU the natural human family is taken seriously by the social sciences,” she commented. “There are abundant opportunities for discoveries in areas yet uncharted.” 

That is why almost immediately upon arriving at Ave Maria she founded the Stein Center for Social Research, a non-partisan, interdisciplinary center for advanced studies in the social sciences, especially economics, sociology, and

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Professor Spotlight: Dr. Daniel Nodes

Classics professor Daniel Nodes loves searching for treasure and sharing what he has found with scholars and students.  The finds are written in Latin and Greek, buried in manuscripts.  Unearthing them is done with tools of philology (being a word-lover), paleography (reading early handwriting) and philosophy (love of the wisdom sought by those writers).

Some treasures are large, like an entire Commentary on the Trinity by Cardinal Giles of Viterbo (1469-1532), which is now getting better known through Prof. Nodes’s edition of the complete text published by E.J. Brill in 2010.  Giles was head of the Augustinian Order at the height of the Renaissance and was widely respected for his learning and preaching.  His Commentary is large and rich, over five hundred pages of Latin and Greek preserved in five handwritten copies.  It has never been published until now: Giles did not take advantage of the new technology, the printing press, as did his subordinate in the Augustinian order, Martin Luther.

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Professor Spotlight: Dr. Michael Pakaluk

Dr. Michael Pakaluk, chairman of the AMU Philosophy Department, was pretending to be upset with his publications for last year: besides half a dozen scholarly papers, “only three books of mine were published last year,” was his mock-complaint, “when I was trying to finish twelve!”

Whatever one’s judgment on the number of books published, one can’t help being impressed by the range of interests they display.

His first book of the year, Human Action and Moral Psychology in Aristotle, was published by Oxford

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Professor Spotlight: Dr. Marc Guerra

Dr. Marc D. Guerra, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in Theology at Ave Maria University, has been awarded a $150,000 grant through the New Sciences of Virtue Project at the University of Chicago. Guerra and his project’s codirector, Dr. Peter Augustine Lawler, Professor of Government and International Studies at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, will use this grant to hold a series of three interdisciplinary conferences at Berry College that focus on the challenges and prospects modern technological society pose to the cultivation of virtue.  The University of Chicago’s multidisciplinary research initiative awarded a grand total of three million dollars to 19 highly original, scholarly projects that have the potential to contribute to a renewed focus on the study of virtue in the contemporary academy. The New Sciences of Virtue Project garnered more than 700 grant applications worldwide. Researchers chosen for funding come from a wide range

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