This letter is part of our Department’s effort to recruit your top students into our Ph.D. program. If you have students who are planning to do graduate work in political science, I hope you advise them to give us serious consideration.
Our Department is an exciting place for faculty and graduate students alike. We now have more than 45 tenure-track or tenured faculty. We enroll 10-12 new graduate students each year. Consequently, our students receive the attention that young scholars need to succeed in the discipline nationally. Students and faculty collaborate on research projects and publish articles and book chapters as coauthors. In recent years our students have published articles, both on their own and with faculty co-authors, in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Comparative Political Studies, as well as many other journals.
We can train a graduate student for virtually any approach—comparative methods, new institutionalism, political behavior, quantitative analysis, and normative theory—and we do so with a rare spirit of collegiality. Our internationally respected scholars cover most thematic and geographic areas in political science. One characteristic sign of the strength and breadth of our Department is that we have National Science Foundation principal investigators as well as National Endowment for the Humanities awardees. For more about our work, we refer you to descriptions of each subfield available at our department webpage, http://politicalscience.nd.edu.
Notre Dame, a university with substantial resources, is committed to our Department’s excellence. We guarantee full tuition and stipend fellowships to all Ph.D. students for five years and can often provide support beyond that. Students also have opportunities to secure generous funding for collaborative research, yearly conference travel, preliminary field research, and specialized summer training. A number of on-campus institutes and centers (e.g. the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy) provide further support and intellectual community (information on these programs is attached). Our students routinely win national research grants. During the past few years, our students have won grants or fellowships from the SSHRC, Javits (U.S. Department of Education), Mellon/ACLS, U.S. Institute of Peace, Fulbright, National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, Belfer Center at Harvard, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, and the National Science Foundation. Recent graduates have been appointed to tenure-track or tenured positions at Michigan State,
Baylor, University of Arkansas, Miami of Ohio, Oxford, Wake Forest, Villanova, City University of New York, University of Texas-Austin, University of Evansville and other fine institutions.
We encourage you to access more information about our program on our web page, http://politicalscience.nd.edu/graduate-program. We look forward to applications from your best students!
