R. Scott Appleby is a professor of history and the Marilyn Keough Dean of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. From 2000-2014, he served as the John M. Regan Jr. Director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. From 1994 to 2001 he served as a director of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. From 1988 to 1993 Appleby was co-director of the Fundamentalism Project, an international public policy study conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to which he was recently elected a Fellow. From 1982 to 1987 he chaired the religious studies department of St. Xavier College, Chicago. Appleby co-chaired the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Task Force on Religion and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy and co-wrote its influential report “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy.” Appleby also co-directs Contending Modernities, a project designed to examine the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and secular forces in the modern world.
A historian of religion who earned his PhD from the University of Chicago (1985), Appleby’s scholarly interests include the role of religion in international affairs, the relationship between conflict resolution, peace-building and human rights, and the history of religion in the United States. He is the author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (2000), a study of religious peace building for the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. He is the editor of Spokesman of the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East (1997) and the co-editor, with Martin E. Marty, of Fundamentalisms Comprehended (1995), and four previous volumes in the University of Chicago Press series on global fundamentalisms, which won the American Academy of Religions Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion. Appleby was a consultant for the PBS film and NPR radio series on fundamentalism, and he coauthored the series’ companion book, The Glory and the Power: The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Modern World.
Professor Appleby is also the author of Church and Age Unite! The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (1992), co-editor of Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America (1995) and co-author of Creative Fidelity: American Catholic Intellectual Traditions (2005) and Transforming Parish Ministry: The Changing Roles of Clergy, Laity, and Women Religious (1989).
