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 Carballo (CAS/Anthropology, Archaeology, & Latin American Studies & CISS Affiliate) The Distribution of Power and Inclusiveness Across Deep Time (Science Advances, Mar 2026) Carballo and his associates present a global, deep-time comparative analysis of governance, questioning entrenched viewpoints about the origins and evolution of democratic institutions. 
Kathleen Corriveau (SED/Applied Human Development & CISS Affiliate) Peaceful Coexistence or Inevitable Clash? Confronting the Claims of Science and religion about Death (Child Development, Mar 2026) Corriveau and her colleagues suggest that scientific and religious conceptions of death do not coexist peacefully, at least when their contradictory nature is highlighted.
Leyla Jafarova (GRS/Anthropology) Death as the Gateway to “Humanity”: The Humanitarian Paradox of Humanity After Life (Polar, Mar 2026) Jafarova examines how humanitarian management of the dead in the Nagorno–Karabakh conflict constructs deceased soldiers as objects of care, incorporating them into “humanity after life”—a postmortem register of humanitarian concern. 
Andrew Stokes (SPH, Global Health & CISS Affiliate) Applying machine learning to identify unrecognized COVID-19 deaths recorded as other causes of death in the United States (Science Advances, Mar 2026) Stokes and his coauthors use machine learning trained on US death certificates from March 2020 to December 2021 to predict unrecognized COVID-19 deaths finding that 19% more COVID-19 deaths occurred in the US than officially reported. 
Christopher Robertson (LAW/Health Law, Policy & Management & CISS Affiliate) Political Theater and the Great Healthcare Plan (JAMA Network, Mar 2026) Robertson & his colleague examine various aspects of the Great Healthcare Plan related to drug pricing, including over-the-counter expansion; subsidies, rebates, and cost sharing; and price transparency.
Samuel Bazzi (CAS/Economics), Jeremy Menchik (Pardee/International Relations and Political Science, director CURA: The Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs), Pujan Paudel (ECE), Gianluca Stringhini (ENG), & Clara Martiny (Pardee ’23) Protests and Radicalization in the Digital Age: The Reopen Movement (Cambridge University Press, Apr 2026) Bazzi, Menchick and their co-authors provide the first large-scale inquiry into the ‘Reopen’ protest movement against COVID-19 public health shutdowns and synthesize digital ethnography inside the movement with text analyses of an original data set spanning more than 1.8 million Facebook comments and posts from over 224,000 online activists. 
Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) Midlife in the United States (MIDUS Refresher 2), 2022-2024 (National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging, Mar 2026) Carr and her co-investigators on the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) are pleased to announce the release of the 2022-24 wave of follow-up data from the Refresher Sample. These data are now publicly available at ICPSR at University of Michigan. MIDUS data allow explorations of how working conditions, relationships, health, finances, and more affect health and well-being over the life course.
Amanda Tarullo (CAS/Psychological & Brain Sciences & CISS Affiliate) ‘It all depends on your faith’: Spiritual illnesses and traditional healing in rural Limpopo Province, South Africa (Journal of Biosocial Science, Mar 2026) Tarullo and her colleagues sought to understand local explanatory models for illness and patient experiences with different traditional health practitioners (THPs) among a population of rural women in Limpopo, South Africa.
Erik Peinert (CAS/Political Science) Strong Intellectual Property and Weak Antitrust: How the End of Vertical Restraints Fissured the US Political Economy (Socio-Economic Review, Mar 2026) Peinert and his co-author show how public and private actors strove to change the interlocked legal regime governing domestic and global intellectual property (IP) rights and antitrust policy to prioritize the value of intangible assets like IP, shifting the distribution of profits among firms and contributing to the ‘fissuring’ of industrial organization.
Jonathan Mijs (CAS/Sociology) Visualizing Belief in Merit and Privilege, 1930 to 2020: Rejoinder (Socius, Mar 2026) In this publication, Mijs offers a two-dimensional visualization of the perceived importance of merit (hard work) and privilege (family wealth), extended to trace changes in public beliefs between 1930 and 2020 across countries in the West. Jointly examining popular beliefs about the importance of merit and privilege brings into focus the predominant belief in merit, in all countries and time periods.
Jonathan R. Zatlin (CAS/History) History as Mourning, Memory as Melancholia: Weimar, Past and Future (Project Muse, Feb 2026) Zatlin and his colleagues make use of the Weimar Republic to suggest that the way we imagine the passing of time—as repetition or progress—is not simply an expression of our politics but also determines why and how we recall the past.
Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) Social Relationship Quality and Cognitive Function: The Roles of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and Depression (The Gerontologist, Feb 2026) Carr and her co-authors examines the extent to which the quality of one’s relationships with spouse, children, friends, and other family members are associated with cognitive function in older adults by gender and racial identities, along with the mediation effect of depressive symptoms for these associations.
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.
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.
Benjamin Siegel (CAS/History & CISS Affiliate) Laboratory of Empire: Calcutta, Opium, and the Wartime Invention of Regulation (The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Jan 2026) Siegel argues that second World War-era experiments in Calcutta transformed opium from a fiscal commodity into an object of moral and bureaucratic concern, linking the crisis of empire to the rise of global governance and tracing how the habits of the Raj survived in the languages of development and expertise. This article reconstructs an unexpected collaboration between the Office of Strategic Services, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and the Government of India, showing how wartime intelligence produced new ways of knowing and administering colonial society.
Quinn Slobodian (Pardee & CISS Affiliate) Writing the History of Neoliberalism: A Comment (Oxford University Research Archive, 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.