HESBURGH LECTURE SERIES 2013 Program - Alumni Association ...

Kathleen S. Cummings ’95 M.A., ’99 Ph.D.
Associate Professor, American Studies; Director, Cushwa Center for
the Study of American Catholicism
Biography
Kathleen Sprows Cummings is an associate professor of American studies and the Director of
the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.
Her teaching and research interests include the history of women and American religion
and the study of U.S. Catholicism. Her first book, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and
American Catholicism in the Progressive Era, appeared in 2009 with the University of North
Carolina Press. At present, Cummings is working on a new book: Citizen Saints: Catholics and
Canonization in American Culture. Cummings received an NEH Fellowship to support work on
this project during the academic year 2010-11.
Lectures
American Saints: Catholics and Canonization in the United States
In the 1880s, U.S. Catholics began to seek a saint of their own. Although it would be almost a century before Elizabeth Ann
Seton was canonized as the first native-born American saint, U.S. Catholics rallied behind a number of causes in a manner that
often revealed as much about their relationship to American culture as it did about the candidates for canonization. This lecture
examines themes of mission, immigration, religious life, and American citizenship in the causes for canonization of the nine
American saints as well as in a number of other open causes. It also explains the essential stages of the modern canonization
process, with a particular focus on the changes to the process implemented by Pope John Paul II.
Telling Her Story: Women Religious in the Catholic Past
This lecture introduces listeners to major themes in the history of American Catholic sisters. It focuses on well-known leaders
such as Elizabeth Ann Seton and Frances Cabrini as well as many of the little-remembered women who have been providing
education, health care, and social services to countless Americans for almost three hundred years. It also explores how the stories
of Catholic women religious intersect with the history of the nation as well as with that of the Church.
28 The Hesburgh Lecture Series, 2013 Program
Categories
Church, History