Programs
Faculty and Staff Development Opportunities
The Institute offers opportunities for faculty and staff from across the disciplines to connect under a shared mission of transforming and integrating the paradigms and pedagogies of liberal arts and the professions. Faculty and staff can make these connections through:
- participating in reading groups,
- participating in lectures, seminars and events,
- applying for upcoming teaching and research fellowships,
- attending professional development opportunities, and more.
Reading Groups
Through periodic reading groups, we invite the Creighton community to explore big ideas together. Recent books have included:
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion by Edward J. Larson (with the Kripke Center for Religion and Society)
Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith (with the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation)
Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference, by Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli
We co-host the Martin Luther King Jr. Reading Group each year. See our intranet page for how to sign up.
The Humanities and AI discussion group
What can the humanities tell us about ourselves and our society in the age of AI? Creighton faculty and staff are invited to wrestle with this and other big questions related to AI. Each session in this series will feature a mini-presentation on a current faculty member's research and then an informal discussion over catered lunch.
Research and Scholarship
Collaborative Scholarly/Creative Project Mini-Seminar
In a mini-seminar, small interdisciplinary groups meet throughout the year as each works on their collaborative project. For 2025-2026, the theme is "Trust and Institutions." Projects are:
Creighton Computing for Good Application Development Lab
Catherine Baker, PhD, Associate Professor of Computer Science
Kevin Lumbard, PhD, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Sherri Weitl-Harms, PhD, Associate Professor of Computer Science
Steven Fernandes, PhD, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Waseq Rahman, PhD, Assistant Professor of Journalism
The goal of this research is to construct an interdisciplinary service-learning framework for sustainable student-led software development projects, improving their usefulness, trustworthiness, and endurance. As part of the project, the team aims to hire students and develop a software application to reduce food waste on campus.
Public Discussion Practice: Cultivating Trust in Institutions
Anne Ozar, PhD, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Philosophy
Jay Leighter, PhD, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, and Director, Sustainability Studies
This project responds to the decline in opportunities for face-to-face public discussion. The team hopes to bring together community members, Creighton students, and topical experts for the purpose of meaningfully discussing complex challenges with human-centered responses. The team aims to examine the conditions unique to individual and local community trust in, for example, healthcare and education, while also exploring how broader changes in public discussion opportunities foster or inhibit trust in institutions.
Parallel Projects
Brooke Kowalke, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and Laura Roost, Resident Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations, are working on individual projects in concert with one another. Roost’s book project, Living Together or Living Divided: Care and Transitional Justice, considers the implications of care ethics for transitional justice. Kowalke’s project, “Dancing with the Forms: Linguistic Risk in Non-Speaking Autistic Poets’ Works,” aims to bring attention to the multiply-marginalized voices of non-speaking autistic persons.
Candace Bloomquist, PhD, associate professor in the EdD in Interdisciplinary Leadership, and Peggy Rupprecht, PhD, associate professor of journalism and public relations, will receive project development funds for promising ideas in early stages.
Curriculum Innovation
This year, we especially encourage proposals that engage students with the topic of trust. Up to Any Creighton faculty member (full- or part-time) teaching a credit-bearing course can apply, including faculty teams. Recipients of the latest grants will be announced in January 2026.
