Learn about the latest books, journal articles, and reports of BU social scientists here.

The Center’s mission is to promote the work of Boston University’s social science faculty and our affiliates. If you have or know of someone who has a new publication, please email us at ciss@bu.edu.

David A. Mayers(CAS/History) Seekers and Partisans: Americans Abroad in the Crisis Years, 1935-1941 (Cambridge University Press, Jan 2026) Mayers recounts the tales of individual Americans, some well-known and some not, who strove to understand their nation and its place in the world in the roiled years 1935–41. The lives and stories of this diverse group shed light on the contested nature of American ambitions, aims, and national purpose, and destabilize what it means to be ‘American.’
Raymond Fisman (CAS/Economics & CISS Affiliate) Audit Centralization and Audit Quality: Evidence from Chinese Cities (Journal of Accounting and Economics, Feb 2025) Fisman and his colleagues find that financial (but not human) resources devoted to city audits increase with centralization.
Hyeouk Chris Hahm (SSW/Social Work & CISS Affiliate) Proactive Coping with Racial Discrimination May Exacerbate Race-Based Traumatic Stress in Diverse Young Adults (Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Feb 2025) Hahm and her coauthors test proactive coping as a moderator of the association between everyday discrimination and race-based traumatic stress symptoms.
Jessica T. Simes (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Mass Incarceration and Its Spillover Effects: A Scoping Review of Incarceration Rates and Health (Social Science and Medicine, Feb 2025) Simes and her colleagues suggest that mass incarceration has had negative population health effects not only through those directly impacted, but through “spillover” onto families and more broadly. We scope the literature to synthesize findings across disciplines and health outcomes.
Pamela Zabala Ortiz (CAS/Sociology) Black Like This, Not Like That: How Afro-Latines Navigate Black and Latine Ethnoracial Hierarchies in the U.S. (Ethic and Racial Studies, Jan 2026) Zabala Ortiz highlights the experiences of Afro-Latines as they navigate the hierarchies that emerge within the spaces of both Blackness and Latinidad in the U.S.
Joshua Robinson (CAS/Archaeology) The Botanic Age: Planting the Seeds of Human Evolution (American Antiquity, Jan 2026) Robinson proposes that our hominim ancestors applied knowledge of working with plant raw materials to new domains when they moved to the ground in response to forest fragmentation caused by late-Miocene climate change.
Quinn Slobodian (Pardee & CISS Affiliate) Writing the History of Neoliberalism: A Comment (Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Jan 2026) Slobodian reconstructs the rise of the category of neoliberalism among historians and identifies the different paths of inquiry it is generating in this series of comments bringing together four historians of neoliberalism, each of whom focuses on a different part of the world but whose work has implications that are transnational if not global.
Peter R. Blake (CAS/Psychological & Brain Sciences & CISS Affiliate) The Role of Social Comparison and Emotion in Children’s Fairness Judgments (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Jan 2026) Blake and his coauthors examined the role of emotions is shaping fairness judgments, both when the child was a recipient and when other children were.
John M. Marston (CAS/Archaeology & Anthropology & CISS Affiliate) Climate Change and World History: Evidence from the Site of Sym-Ota 1 in the Aral Sea Basin (Quaternary Science Advances, Jan 2026) Marston and his colleagues present new radiocarbon dating and environmental data from the river-adjacent site of Sym-Ota 1 at the base of the Khorezmian pivot that indicates inhabitants were able to modify the main channel of the Amu Darya 700 years earlier than previously known, by ca. 300 BCE suggesting that the hydromorphology of the Amu Darya delta has been shaped by over 2,000 years of human ecosystem engineering. 
Cheryl Knott (CAS/Anthropology), Faye Harwell (CAS/Anthropology) and Erin Kane (CAS/Anthropology) Sex Differences in Estimated Lean Body Mass of Captive and Wild Orangutans (American Journal of Biological Anthropology, Jan 2026) Knott, Harwell, Kane and their co-authors investigate muscle mass differences of wild and captive orangutans among the age-sex classes while accounting for flange status.
Amanda Tarullo (CAS/Psychological and Brain Sciences & CISS Affiliate)  Physiological Markers of Early Social Skills in Rural South Africa: The Role of Frontal Alpha Asymmetry and Heart Rate Variability (PubMed, Jan 2026) The prevalence of adversities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is linked to pervasive deficits in early social skills, yet little is known about the role of physiology in contributing to these processes. In this study, Tarullo and her colleagues explore two physiological measures across two timepoints in relation to social skills in a rural, low-resourced context.