CISS Faculty To Give Book Talks at CAS 150th Alumni Weekend (September 22)
As part of BU’s College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) 150th Alumni Weekend Celebration, CISS will host a Faculty Book Talk event on Friday, September 22nd, 2023 from 2:30 – 4:30 pm in the CISS conference room at 704 Commonwealth Ave, 5th Floor. Faculty authors will discuss and share highlights from their recent books. Come meet the authors and enjoy refreshments. We encourage you to register for the session, to help CAS gauge attendance at the weekend’s event.
Presenters will include:
Brooke Blower, Associate Professor of History, is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer as well as the recipient of the Society for Historians of Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize. Her research focuses on modern American political culture, travel, and war in urban and transnational contexts. She will discuss her book Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper (Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2023), a vivid narrative of an ill-fated Pan American flight during World War II. She captures the dramatic backstories of the flight’s passengers and, through them, the impact of Americans’ global connections. This book uncovers a surprising history of American noncombatants abroad in the years leading into the twentieth century’s most consequential conflict. Long before GIs began storming beaches and liberating towns, Americans had forged extensive political, economic, and personal ties to other parts of the world. These deep and sometimes contradictory engagements, which preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would shape and in turn be transformed by the US war effort.
Deborah Carr, Professor of Sociology and director of the Center of Innovation in Social Science, has written extensively on death and dying, bereavement, family relationships over the life course, and the stigma associated with health conditions including obesity and disability. She received the 2022 Matilda White Riley Distinguished Scholar Award and 2023 Outstanding Mentorship Award from the American Sociological Association’s Aging & Life Course section. She will discuss her book Aging in America (University of California Press, 2023), a lively, nuanced, and timely portrait of aging in the United States. The US population is older than ever before, raising new challenges for families, caregivers, health care systems, and social programs like Social Security and Medicare. Drawing on state-of-the-art data, current events, and pop culture, this portrait of an aging population challenges outdated myths and vividly shows how future cohorts of older adults will differ from the generations before them.
Joanna Davidson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include cultural conceptions of knowledge, anthropological engagements with development, and the politics of storytelling. She will talk about her book Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage around the World (Rutgers University Press, 2022). This volume provides a nuanced ethnographic account of the ways that women are moving the needle on marital norms and practices. Opting Out reveals the conditions that make this widespread phenomenon possible in places where marriage has long been obligatory. This book offers sensitive and powerful portrayals of women as they escape or reshape marriage into a more rewarding arrangement.
Susan Eckstein, Professor of Sociology and Pardee School of Global Studies, has published work on Mexican urban poor, political-economic developments in Cuba, Cuban immigrants, immigration policy, impacts of Latin American revolutions, and Latin American social movements and social rights. She will talk about her latest book Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Cuban Privilege highlights how Washington, in the process of privileging Cubans, transformed them from agents of US Cold War foreign policy into a politically powerful force influencing national policy. Comparing the exclusionary treatment of neighboring Haitians, the book
Loretta Lees, Professor of Sociology and Director of Initiative on Cities, is an urban geographer committed to justice. She is internationally known for her research on gentrification and urban regeneration, global urbanism, urban policy, urban public space, architecture, and urban social theory. She is also known for her policy impact and deep community engagement. She will discuss her book Defensible Space on the Move: Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice (Wiley Press, 2022). This book reveals defensible space to be ambiguous, uncertain in nature, neither proven or disproven scientifically. This book makes an important conceptual contribution to policy mobilities thinking, to policy and practice, and also to practitioners handling of complex spatial concepts,
Robert E. B. Lucas, Professor of Economics, has served as the Chief Technical Adviser to the Malaysia Human Resource Development Program, a member of the Advisory Committee to the India US Business Council, the Delegation to India by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the G8 Global Remittances Working Group, the Steering Committee for the Global Research Competition of the Global Development Network, and as Chair of the Inter-University Committee on International Migration. His research has focused largely, though not exclusively, on developing countries. He will present his book Crossing the Divide: Rural to Urban Migration in Developing Countries (Oxford University Press, 2022). The book provides a comprehensive examination of the nature, causes, and consequences of internal migration in developing countries. Crossing the Divide examines the nature, causes, and consequences of population movements between the rural and urban sectors of developing countries.