Building Bridges with Boston and the World
BU Arts & Sciences faculty and students are deeply connected with the city through scholarship, collaboration, and outreach. Our courses take students into the city, our programs bring students from throughout Greater Boston to our Charles River Campus, and our faculty study the people, places, and environments of Boston and beyond, solving problems and creating solutions to challenges facing communities throughout the world. They do this in partnership with the communities that we work in.
MetroBridge Connects Local Governments and Community Organizations With BU Students and Faculty
During the spring 2022 semester, students at Boston University partnered with local governments and community-based organizations through the MetroBridge Program to address real-world urban challenges.
Humanities Center Summer Program Teaches the Classics to Local High Schoolers
A Teagle Foundation grant brings teens to BU to study Plato and prepare for college.
Tracing the History of New England’s Ice Trade
A BU history professor studies long-gone industry, and how climate change would have made it virtually impossible today.
New Book Explores the Toll of Mass Incarceration and Its Racial Disparities
In her new book, Assistant Professor of Sociology Jessica Simes examines how Black and Latinx neighborhoods in deindustrialized smaller cities have become communities of loss—robbed by the prison system of family members, wage earners, potential voters, and citizens.
How Our Refugee System Fails Desperate People
With thousands fleeing Ukraine and millions still displaced by the Syrian civil war, a new book by Heba Gowayed, Moorman-Simon, assistant professor of sociology, faults the United States, Canada, and Germany for letting down refugees.
Researching vanishing global languages
Assistant Professor of Linguistics Kate Lindsey is a linguistics detective, researching vanishing global languages that include Ende, spoken by only about 600 people in Papua New Guinea.
Faculty Launch China Historical Christian Database
Associate Professor of History Eugenio Menegon and Assistant Professor of Theology Daryl Ireland helped the Center for Global Christianity & Mission launch the China Historical Christian Database, which quantifies and visualizes the place of Christianity in modern China (1550-1950). The CHCD maintains the largest dataset on Christianity in China ever assembled.
Empowering Citizen Scientists to Study and Protect Coastal Wetlands
City trees and soil are sucking more carbon out of the atmosphere than we previously thought. Researchers found that trees and soils on the outermost edge of forests may have a role in fighting climate change—but the benefits might not last.
Where Are All the Lesbian Bars?
Professor and Chair of Sociology Japonica Brown-Saracino researches the impact of losing queer spaces in cities grappling with gentrification and how dyke bars are celebrated long after they close.
Was the Patriot Front March in Boston a Sign of the New KKK?
Katie Lennard, American & New England Studies Program inaugural Abbott Lowell Cummings Postdoctoral Fellow in American Material Culture, on how the hate group’s July 2 pop-up protest does—and does not—resemble the Klan of the past.
Wildfire Smoke in New England Is “Pretty Severe from Public Health Perspective”
Environmental earth scientist on this week’s hazy, smoke-filled skies