Applications are now closed for this seminar.
This seminar is designed as an introduction and immersion into Catholic social thought for graduate students and faculty in economics, finance, or related fields. Participants will cover foundational principles in Catholic social thought starting with the human person, dignity, freedom, subsidiarity, solidarity, and the common good, and moving toward applications of these principles to conceptual understandings and ethical considerations involving economic topics such as utility theory, firm and business ethics, wages, markets, globalization, poverty, and development. Participants will delve into social encyclicals, secondary sources, and relevant economics texts.
This seminar is cosponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame, the Catholic Research Economists Discussion Organization, and the Markets, Culture, and Ethics Research Center at the Pontifical University of Santa Croce.
Format: There will be twenty hours of class in addition to a full Roman experience. Each class will open with a brief lecture, and then we will turn to a seminar style discussion of the texts and issues at hand. Classroom activities will be supplemented with opportunities for daily Mass, meetings with Church leadership, and visits to famous sights in Rome.
Location: The seminar will take place in Rome, split between the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway and the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce. Students will be provided with accommodations and meals, and a limited number of travel stipends are available on a need basis.
Application Information:
This seminar will be open to Ph.D. students and faculty in Economics, Finance and related fields.
Applicants will be required to submit a completed online application form, including:
- An updated CV.
- A brief statement of research interest no longer than 750 words.
- One academic writing sample.
All application materials can be submitted via the online application. Incomplete applications will not be considered. 15 students will be admitted to this seminar.
Application materials must be received by 11:59pm on MARCH 4, 2017.
Please direct any further questions to contact@credo-economists.org.
Martijn Cremers is the Martin J. Gillen Dean and the Bernard J. Hank Professor of Finance at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. He served as interim dean at Mendoza from July 2018 to June 2019. Prior to joining Notre Dame in 2012, Cremers was a faculty member at the Yale School of Management from 2002 to 2012. His research and teaching areas are investment management, corporate finance, corporate governance, corporate law, business ethics and Catholic social thought. His research focuses on empirical issues in investments and corporate governance, and has been published in the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Stanford Law Review, and Northwestern Law Review, among others. Cremers is also a member of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture's Faculty Advisory Committee.
Fr. Robert Gahl is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Vice-Director of the Markets, Culture, and Ethics Research Center at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. After studies in graduate philosophy at the University of Navarre, Spain, he finished his doctorate in Rome at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross and did postdoctoral research at the University of Notre Dame. A professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross since 1991, he has published on natural law theory, sexual ethics, moral action, and the narrative structure of the moral life. His interviews and comments regarding ethics and religious affairs have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, La Presse, The National Catholic Reporter, The National Catholic Register, Relgion News Service, Cox News Service, and Catholic News Service.
Mary Hirschfeld is Associate Professor of Economics and Theology at Villanova University. Dr. Hirschfeld holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. She works at the boundary between both disciplines, specifically by developing an approach to economics that is grounded in the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, with applications to questions of consumption economics, economic justice, the common good, the nature of practical reason, and economic methodology. She is the author of Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy (Harvard, 2018) and her writings on economics have been published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Economic Education, and History of Political Economy.
