R. Scott Appleby

Scott Appleby is the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Global Affairs and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. From 2014 to 2024 he served as the Marilyn Keough Dean in the Keough School of Global Affairs and before that, the director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. The author or editor of 15 books, Appleby examines the ways religions and religiously inspired actors shape and are shaped by modern ideas, institutions, practices and conflicts. His publications include The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation, The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding, and the five volumes of the The Fundamentalism Project (University of Chicago Press), which he edited with Martin E. Marty.

Appleby has also written extensively about American religious history, Catholicism in the United States, and strategic peacebuilding around the world. Among other media appearances, he was called to offer public commentary on 9/11 and on the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Roman Catholicism. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Appleby (PhD, University of Chicago) is the recipient of five honorary degrees.