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 possibilit...

Friendship and the Good Life

Dr. Michael Pakaluk, the Chairman of the Philosophy department, is known for his work on the philosophy of friendship.  In a recent interview, he explained how he became interested in the subject and why it is important.
Pakaluk: I wrote my dissertation on friendship at Harvard, and I can remember the exact moment when I d...

Dr Colin Barr, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History, was recently elected to a prestigious Visiting Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College in the University of Cambridge.  Founded in 1596, Sidney Sussex is an integral part of the University of Cambridge and numbers among its famous members Oliver Cromwell, whose severed head is preserved in a secret location within the C...

The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is widely known for his famous poems "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan". The familiar term "psychosomatic," and the phrase "the willing suspension of disbelief," have passed into popular modern usage, while most are unaware of their origin in Coleridge. In fact, Coleridge, along with his friend and collaborator William Wordsworth, who tog...

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....

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, wil...

This is an exciting time for Physics in general. In the waning days of 2011, it was reported that the long-sought-for Higgs particle may have been glimpsed at the Large Hadronic Collider [LHC] at CERN located near Geneva, Switzerland. Additional data, to be taken this year will confirm or dash the hopes of many. Earlier in the Fall, the OPERA experiment, announced a finding of seeming...

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 lar...

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 in...

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 in global economic interactions, particularly the effect of the quality of institutions on living standards across countries.

We know that we live in a "globali...