Three members of the Kroc Institute's core faculty (left to right): Ernesto Verdeja, Atalia Omer, and Jason Springs.

I named this blog 24 Peace Scholars for a reason — I get more questions about faculty than about any other issue. Who are “the faculty” of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and what do they do?

Like an interdisciplinary school within a university, the Kroc Institute has “core” faculty — about 2 dozen scholar-teachers in a number of fields (with expertise in peace or conflict) who have been recruited, hired, and appointed to the Kroc Institute. (Thank you, Mrs. Kroc, for the endowment that makes this possible.)

Among those faculty, just over half are full-time “teaching and research faculty” who have tenure or are on a tenure track. Their primary job is:

1) to contribute to the knowledge base by conducting research and publishing on peace, violent conflict, justice, human security, and related issues, and

2) to teach, mentor, and advise students in the undergraduate, master’s, and Ph.D. programs in peace studies.

Kroc Institute’s teaching and research faculty are:

Scott Appleby (tenured in history)
Catherine Bolten (tenure track in anthropology)
Christian Davenport (tenured in political science)
Larissa Fast (special tenure track in peace studies via sociology)
Robert C. Johansen (tenured in political science)
Asher Kaufman (tenured in history)
George A. Lopez (tenured in political science)
Mary Ellen O’Connell (tenured in law)
Atalia Omer (special tenure track in peace studies via sociology)
Daniel Philpott (tenured in political science)
Emad Shahin (tenured in political science)
Jason Springs (special tenure track in peace studies via sociology)
Ernesto Verdeja (tenure track in political science)

Other faculty members at the Kroc Institute hold non-tenure-track positions as “special professional” faculty or as research faculty. Special professional faculty have advanced degrees and wide-ranging international and professional experience; their primary job is to bring that expertise and skill set into program administration and the practice of peacebuilding. Many also teach and conduct research, especially in areas related to policy and practice.

True to their name, research faculty conduct research as well as teach; some are at the Kroc Institute all year, and a few are senior international researchers and/or peacebuilders who spend part of  the year at the Kroc Institute and the rest in their home country or other parts of the world.

Kroc Institute special professional and research faculty are:

David Cortright (Director of Policy Studies)
Hal Culbertson (Executive Director of the Institute)
John Darby (Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies)
Pamina Firchow (Associate Director of Doctoral Studies)
Madhav Joshi (Research Assistant Professor; Associate Director of the Peace Accords Matrix)
John Paul Lederach (Professor of International Peacebuilding)
Erik Melander (Senior Research Fellow)
Rashied Omar (Research Scholar of Islamic Studies and Peacebuilding)
Gerard F. Powers (Professor of the Practice of Catholic Peacebuilding)
Susan St. Ville (Director of the Master’s Program)
Peter Wallensteen (Richard G. Starmann Sr. Research Professor of Peace Studies)

Last year the Kroc Institute added two adjunct faculty members, Bernie Mayer and Julie MacFarlane, experienced mediation specialists who teach master’s students.

By the way, the Kroc Institute is growing, with searches underway for a senior rank faculty member in peace studies and an open rank faculty member in gender and peace studies. More information about faculty openings is available here.

In my next post, I’ll explain, “Who Are the Fellows of the Kroc Institute?”

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