Scott Appleby, professor of history and Marilyn Keough Dean of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters degree on May 13 from Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania. Appleby delivered the keynote address to the university’s undergraduate commencement ceremony.
“I am delighted to help celebrate the hundreds of Misericordia graduates, the tradition begun by the Sisters of Mercy, and, not least, the university presidency of our friend and former Notre Dame colleague Daniel J. Myers, who is leading Misericordia to a bright future in a time of severe challenges to smaller, regional Catholic institutions of higher education,” Appleby said.
The inaugural dean of the Keough School, a position he has held since 2014, Appleby previously served as the Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and, prior to that assignment, as Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism.
Appleby’s research examines the ways religions and religiously inspired actors shape and are shaped by modern ideas, institutions, practices, and conflicts. His publications include The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation; The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding; Catholics in the American Century; and the five volumes of the The Fundamentalism Project, which he edited with Martin E. Marty.
Appleby also has written extensively about American religious history, Catholic modernism and traditionalism, and strategic peacebuilding around the world. Among other media appearances, he was called to offer public commentary on 9/11 and on the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Roman Catholicism. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Appleby is the recipient of four honorary degrees. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago.
