Five scholars join center for new curricular and research efforts

August 17, 2023

Five scholars will join the Center this fall as faculty and research associates.

Megan Levis, Ph.D. joins us as an assistant professor of the practice with both the Center and the College of Engineering. Her research is focused on questions about how technology shapes our shared understanding of what it means to be human, how we can design digital spaces to encourage virtuous habits, and how to shape engineering curricula to build character alongside core engineering skills and competencies. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Notre Dame’s Technology Ethics Center in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. She is currently working on a book about Catholic social teaching and social technologies.
“I’m looking forward to bringing Catholic Social Teaching into conversation with technology design,” she says. “I want to see how technology can be a tool for good in the world and uncover changes needed to diminish technology’s contribution to social concerns. I’ll also be working with professors in engineering to bring character formation into the engineering classrooms and develop a new technology and justice course for the spring semester.”

Katie Comeau, Ph.D. will apply her expertise in well-being, religion, and organizations to support the new Called to the Common Good fellows where she provides mentorship and research supervision. Katie maintains several research projects connecting her interests in organizations and leadership. The first examines the strategies churches adopt to address climate change in their communities. The project assesses how factors such as geographic location, church size, and denomination affect the way a church helps its community navigate the effects of climate change.

Helal Mohammed Khan, Ph.D. is an anthropologist working in peace and justice and will work on expanding the Center’s outreach in South Bend and Mishawaka. He will also design and teach a spring semester course that draws on his doctoral research with Rohingya refugee communities in the Midwest as well as previous research with immigrant communities in Europe and the UK. Helal has held a Presidential Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, a Chevening Scholarship at the University of Edinburgh, and a Flanders Government Master Mind Scholarship at the University of Leuven. Helal is currently working on a book project provisionally titled, “The Abling Refugee and Regimes of Cooperation: Myanmar’s Rohingya in the American Midwest.” Helal was a Graduate Justice Fellow at the Center during the 2022-23 academic year.

Geneva Hutchinson, MFA comes to the Center with experience at The Salvation Army Kroc Center and Robinson Community Learning Center. Geneva’s research examines the complexities of Christian purity culture, sexual trauma, and physical and spiritual abuse within the church. As an artist, she creates artwork related to these ideas and through creating seeks healing and reclamation for herself and other women with this lived experience. Geneva was a Graduate Justice Fellow at the Center during the 2022-23 academic year.

Samuel Sokolsky-Tifft, Ph.D. is a historian who does research on mass incarceration. He focuses on collective responsibility and new understandings of guilt, building on philosophy, history, literature, and political theory from Modern Europe, North Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as contemporary abolitionist thought and the field of critical carceral studies. He has taught in prisons in the U.S. and England, and at Cambridge, Purdue, and Harvard, and is currently working on a new book, Reconceiving Guilt: The Philosophy of Guilt, Collective Responsibility, and Political Agency in the Age of Mass Incarceration.

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