Kathleen Sprows Cummings

Kathleen Sprows Cummings is the Rev. John A. O’Brien Collegiate Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame. She holds concurrent appointments in Gender Studies and the Department of Theology, and she is also affiliated faculty in Italian Studies, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. From 2012 to 2023, she served as the William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism.

Cummings’ most recent book, A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019. Cummings’ first book, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era, also was published by North Carolina 2009. She co-edited, with R. Scott Appleby, Catholics and the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History (Cornell University Press, 2012). She also co-edited, with Timothy Matovina and Robert Orsi, Catholics in the Vatican II Era: Local Histories of a Global Event, published in 2017 with Cambridge University Press. She is the editor of Roman Sources for the Study of American Catholicism, 1763-1939, a guide to 59 archival repositories in Rome and at the Holy See, which was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2018. Cummings served as the president of the American Catholic Historical Association in 2017.

Cummings teaches classes on the history of women, Catholicism, sanctity, and American religion at the University of Notre Dame. Between 2013 and 2023 Cummings oversaw the Conference on the History of Women Religious, an academic organization devoted to the historical study of Catholic sisters. Cummings often serves as a media commentator on contemporary events in the Church.She is frequently quoted in the New York Times and other media outlets on Catholic subjects. For examples of her media commentary see ND in the News.

Between 2020 and 2022, Cummings co-directed a project under the auspices of the Cushwa Center called “Gender, Sex, and Power: Toward a History of Sex Abuse in the U.S. Catholic Church.” She is presently working on a book on the Spotlight scandal. Cummings’ forthcoming article in the Irish Theological Quarterly, “Monumental Women: Commemoration, Vocation, and Irish Migration in the Sisters of the Holy Cross,” is part of a longer term project examining the migration of Catholic sisters from Ireland and Italy to the United States in the 19th century.

Contact

Office: 310B O’Shaughnessy Hall
Phone: (574) 631-8749
Email: kcumming@nd.edu