French Catholic thought across borders: Five questions with Jacob Saliba
Jacob Saliba joined Notre Dame in summer 2026 as a Cushwa Center postdoctoral research associate cosponsored by the University’s Global Catholic Research Initiative (GCRI). Trained as an intellectual historian of modern Europe, Saliba’s research explores the influence of Catholic thought on 20th-century politics, culture, and philosophy, including questions of interreligious dialogue, secularism, and globalization. His current research focuses on the community bonds formed between Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and secular intellectuals in France, Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the United States between World War I and World War II. Saliba earned his Ph.D. in history and his M.A. in political science from Boston College. He received the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award for 2026.
In July, Shane Ulbrich corresponded with Saliba about his graduate school experience and dissertation as well as the year ahead.
Shane Ulbrich: Tell us about your graduate school years at Boston College. How did your research focus develop, and what were some key moments?
Jacob Saliba: I always felt fortunate to be able to pursue my graduate studies at a Catholic university where the very tradition that I analyzed in my research was made visible to me firsthand through encounters with trusted colleagues, scholars, and friends. So much, if not all, of our research is uplifted by the communities we are a part of. Boston College was no exception.
When I first arrived to pursue my M.A. in political science at BC, I quickly found myself interested not merely in the quantifiable relationship between religion and politics but in the people, institutions, and ideas of the past that could help us think about the deep stakes of the Catholic tradition today. Much of this was also influenced by the many scholars I engaged with while serving as primary editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog.
Specifically, I might mention two important moments from my time in the Ph.D. program at BC. The first, grounded in the power of interdisciplinary inquiry, was Richard Kearney’s course on philosophy of religion. The impact was less from the readings (not that I wasn’t fascinated by the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricœur) than from the way in which these thinkers were narrated as part of a world bigger than themselves. As my dissertation grew over the years and the historian’s responsibility for narration became far more clear, I found myself more interested in those Catholic figures who were themselves acutely aware of the ethical and political stakes of their tradition in an increasingly secularized world—which is one reason why France and its legacy of laïcité made a large impression on me. The second defining moment occurred in the History Department’s seminar on modern Europe, which made it very clear to me that any compelling history of religion in France was necessarily tied to the tensions, dilemmas, and aspirations of the growing global order in the last century.
SU: Tell us about your dissertation. You recently defended, in June—congratulations! And congratulations on receiving the John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award. How did you arrive at the topic?
JS: Thank you! It’s an immense pleasure to reach this academic milestone, especially with an award from the ACHA. My topic, building on interdisciplinary and transnational research, came into focus, in part, through inspiration from books by Ed Baring, Sarah Shortall, Brenna Moore, Piotr Kosicki, and Stephen Schloesser, S.J., paving the way for me to ask new questions as well as instilling confidence in my adventures in archives. In order to realize the uniqueness of that historical moment wherein Catholics formed deep bonds of community with a variety of thinkers of other faith traditions and national backgrounds, I felt I needed to do a deep dive into the archival material, hoping to recover letters and unpublished manuscripts that may have been obscured over time. I confess that I wasn’t necessarily surprised to find dozens of these materials simply because I knew how my main thinkers—Gabriel Marcel, Gaston Fessard, S.J., Emmanuel Mounier, and Jacques Maritain—were themselves invested in experimentation, dialogue, and interpersonal exchange. Some of the century’s great thinkers in phenomenology, alterity, feminism, human rights, and political theology counted on those Catholic intellectuals as crucial dialogue partners.
SU: What was your favorite chapter or two to write?
JS: If I had to pick a favorite chapter or two (which is tough because all of my chapters speak on different registers), I quite like my chapters on Mounier and feminism as well as on Maritain serving as president of the Free French University in New York while in exile. The former gave me an opportunity to explore a topic that remains very little-discussed, despite Mounier being a known name, and to situate Catholicism in relationship to some fascinating scholarship on gender emerging in the last decade. (It also allowed me to talk about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the “eternal feminine,” which also remains a bit under-explored.) The Maritain chapter was an equal favorite because I bridged, across thousands of miles, archival materials and fragments between the Maritain Center here at Notre Dame and the Bibliothèque nationale de France—always an exciting moment in a historian’s research! I’ll add that Maritain’s activism during World War II in the U.S., working directly with the Rockefeller Foundation and the New School for Social Research to save Jewish writers from Nazi-occupied Europe, powerfully demonstrated how the Catholic tradition is built on the vita activa as much as it is on the vita contemplativa.
SU: Tell us about your decision to apply for a fellowship with the Cushwa Center.
JS: My decision actually came quite easily. I was grateful to have received a travel grant from Cushwa a few years ago to consult Maritain’s archives at the Maritain Center (one of the great gems on campus). I felt that after the election of Pope Leo XIV, American Catholicism and its relationship to the rest of the world were cast in a new light. A lot of my own research on the 20th century, especially as World War II loomed and then erupted, investigates the globalizing effects of questions of human rights, exile, and migration—questions that feel extra timely today. If these were some conceptual reasons, I will also tie back to the Catholic liberal arts, more broadly, as another reason. Notre Dame’s commitment—like BC and many Catholic universities—to understanding the perennial demands of the human condition as both an intellectual and lived task resonated deeply with me. I am very excited to continue this work in the vibrant intellectual community at Notre Dame.
SU: What are you looking forward to about the year ahead at Notre Dame?
JS: While working towards my doctorate, I published articles in the Catholic Historical Review, the Journal of Global Catholicism, and the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, as well as two French-to-English book translations: Authority, History, and Political Theology: Collected Works and Correspondence of Alexandre Kojève and Gaston Fessard (Bloomsbury, 2026) and Thinking God Otherwise: Entering into the Work of Emmanuel Falque (Wipf and Stock, 2025). I mention these publications because while at Notre Dame I plan to continue to work across disciplines in order to explore new areas and scholarly conversations in which Catholicism can be understood for its expansive and ecumenical historical and normative spaces. To be able to do some of that as part of the newly established GCRI, under the direction of Kathleen Cummings, is a tremendous opportunity. The time is certainly ripe for thinking about the stakes of the global on all registers, and the GCRI is poised to help us rethink what those stakes are and why they matter. The Maritain Center likewise, building on the great legacy of Maritain as a world-renowned thinker, is just as meaningful a place for me and my work ahead.
While translations continue to be a point of interest for me, especially where language itself can serve as a bridge across borders and cultures, I have a couple of my own projects in progress. Firstly, the direct support of the Cushwa Center and David Lantigua as well as the people and resources of the GCRI and Maritain Center will help to refine my dissertation into a book manuscript. More broadly, I look forward to not only being of service to the missions of the Cushwa Center and GCRI but also to the many scholars and researchers throughout Notre Dame as this year’s exciting events and programming unfold!
Originally published by at cushwa.nd.edu on August 28, 2026. Republished at medieval.nd.edu on September 02, 2026.