Two University of Notre Dame faculty members have been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, continuing the University’s record success in winning support for humanities research.
Rebecca Maloy, the J.W. van Gorkom Professor of Music and director of Sacred Music at Notre Dame, and Alexander Jech, a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy, were among the 84 scholars nationwide to receive the competitive awards in 2026.
During her NEH fellowship, Maloy will work on a monograph exploring the Old Hispanic rite, tentatively titled “Sounding the Saints in Early Medieval Iberia.” Jech will write a monograph that wrestles with the totality of Søren Kierkegaard’s seminal 1843 work, Fear and Trembling.
Maloy has studied medieval liturgy and chant, specifically Hispanic liturgy, for more than 15 years. She examines how liturgy and music influenced ideas about saints and sainthood on the Iberian Peninsula, a region with traditions of liturgical commemoration distinct from other parts of the medieval world.
Drawing from liturgical manuscripts, she will show how the text and melodies of Old Hispanic liturgy shaped the identities, beliefs, and agency of medieval communities.
For Maloy, studying worship practices from the past provides a fresh perspective on how worship can be done in the modern world. Medieval Christians understood the importance of music in worship, especially how belief could be shaped and amplified by the beauty of a melody.
“While earlier scholars have doubted whether chant melodies relate to the semantic content of their texts, the answer here is a resounding ‘yes!’” Maloy said. “The liturgies were designed to imprint key saintly values by making a maximum impact on the memory and senses.”
Maloy’s research has implications beyond her subfield, as studying devotion to the saints gives medievalists key insights into what mattered in medieval societies and how those priorities influenced historical events.
Maloy approaches her work having personally experienced the power of music on belief as director of Sacred Music at Notre Dame. The graduate program equips organ, choral conducting, and voice students with professional performance experience and theological training so they can become future music leaders in churches, concert halls, and schools and universities.
“One of the principles behind SMND is the idea that music can serve as a channel and a means of evangelization,” she said. “It’s very exciting to me to study how that was done in the Middle Ages,” she said.
Jech, meanwhile, will write a monograph tentatively titled “The Paradox of Faith: A Literary-Philosophical Commentary on Fear and Trembling,” which seeks to fill a gap in existing scholarly analysis of Kierkegaard’s most important and difficult work.
Existing commentaries and analyses of Fear and Trembling either operate at an introductory level or focus on only a subset of its themes, arguments, and ideas, Jech said, and these works almost always approach the philosophical, not the literary, side. After noticing this gap while preparing to teach a course on existentialism many years ago, Jech devoted significant time to considering how its parts worked together and how he could approach writing a detailed commentary that considers it as a whole.
“I realized there was a need to consider how it blends together literary and philosophical methods in pursuit of a religious topic,” Jech said. “The philosophical side has been so central that it’s been difficult to explain how it achieves its intellectual lightning strike — you need to consider both perspectives to do that.”
With the fellowship, Jech will spend time in Copenhagen, exploring archives of Kierkegaard’s manuscripts and notes to gain insight into his thought process while writing Fear and Trembling. Those notes also reference periodicals and other documents from Kierkegaard’s era that Jech intends to track down while in Denmark as well as talking with scholars of the Danish Golden Age about Danish poetry and the impact of Romanticism on 19th-century Danish culture.
An extended treatise on the nature of faith as demonstrated in Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, Fear and Trembling challenges “Sunday School definitions” of the concept and wrestles with what it means to truly believe in God. Jech hopes his book will be a means by which scholars of philosophy and literature, as well as educated lay people, can more thoroughly engage with the way Kierkegaard explores that concept.
“The paradox of faith, for Kierkegaard, has to do with fulfilling the passion of faith and not just understanding how pursuing it leads to being fulfilled,” he said. “Being faithful can mean that what you are doing seems to be undermining everything — Abraham raises the knife above the child of promise — but that’s the heart of the paradox. You try to do something, but you also seem to undermine it by how you pursue it, by depending on God for it. Abraham is the most intense version of this, but for Kierkegaard, that paradox applies to anyone who tries to live religiously, from Abraham to the person who simply tries to follow the Sermon on the Mount.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on March 27, 2026.