2025 Madeleva Lecture: Holy Women Making History

2025 Madeleva Lecture presents

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, PhD.
"Holy Women Making History"

The Center for the Study of Spirituality invites you to join us on April 10 at 7 p.m. for the 2025 Madeleva Lecture.  For more than 40 years, the Madeleva Lecture series has brought a renowned women scholar of religion to campus to deliver a public address. Recent lecturers include Natalia Imperatori-Lee; Cristina L.H. Traina; and Barbara Reid, OP. 

The 2025 lecturer, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, is a professor of American studies and history at the University of Notre Dame, and a concurrent faculty member in Gender Studies, Italian Studies, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. She is also a fellow of the Keough Institute for Irish Studies and the Ansari Institute for Global Religious Engagement.

Cummings’ new 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 April 2019. She published her first book, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era, with the University of North Carolina Press in 2009. She co-edited (with R. Scott Appleby) Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History, published by Cornell University Press in 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. Cummings edited Roman Sources for the Study of American Catholicism, 1763–1939, a guide to 59 archival repositories in Rome and at the Holy See, written by Matteo Binasco and published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2018. She served as the president of the American Catholic Historical Association in 2017, and was the director of the Cushwa Center from 2012 to 2023.

Cummings teaches classes on the history of women, Catholicism, sanctity, and American religion at the University of Notre Dame. She was the coordinator of the "Conference on the History of Women Religious" from 2013-2023. She often serves as a media commentator on contemporary events in the Church. Cummings appeared on NBC’s live coverage of the conclave in March 2013, the canonization of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII in April 2014, and the papal visit to the United States in September 2015. She is frequently quoted in the New York Times and other media outlets on Catholic subjects. 

This is a free event. A livestream will be available. Please register for the livestream here.

About the Madeleva Lecture Series

The Madeleva Lecture is named for Sister Madeleva Wolff, CSC, who served as president of the College from 1934-1961. Her many accomplishments include the establishment in 1943 of the School of Sacred Theology, the first institution in the United States to provide graduate education in theology to women. Although the school closed in 1969, the lecture series named in her honor has for over three decades given voice to women scholars in the discipline of theology. In 2000, the sixteen past Madeleva lecturers created the Madeleva Manifesto, a document of hope and courage to women in the church. The document is just as timely today as when it was originally written. More information on the Madeleva Lecture Series can be found here.