Scott Appleby
Scott Appleby, professor of history and the Marilyn Keough Dean of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, will receive an honorary degree May 6 from Saint Xavier University in Chicago. He also will deliver the commencement address to graduates of Saint Xavier’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Appleby is a scholar of global religion who has been a member of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1994. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1978 and received his master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Chicago. His research examines the ways in which religious movements and organizations shape, and are shaped by, national, regional and global dynamics. He co-directs Contending Modernities, a major multi-year project to examine the interaction among Catholic, Muslim and secular forces in the modern world.
Appleby co-chaired the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Task Force on Religion and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy, which in 2010 released the influential report “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy.” From 2000 to 2014, he served as the John M. Regan Jr. Director of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. In 2014 he was appointed the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School — Notre Dame’s first new college or school in nearly a century — which will open its doors to students in August.
From 1988 to 1993, Appleby was co-director of the Fundamentalism Project, an international public policy study conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author or editor of 15 books, including the widely cited volumes of “The Fundamentalism Project” (co-edited with Martin E. Marty and published by the University of Chicago Press) and “The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation.” He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and he is the recipient of three other honorary degrees, from Fordham University, Scranton University and St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.
Saint Xavier also will confer an honorary degree on Carolyn Woo, former Martin J. Gillen Dean of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, and she will address the graduates of SXU’s Graham School of Management.