Welcome to the CISS “Meet Our Faculty Affiliates” feature. Communications Manager Lily Belisle (CAS ’24; Sociology) shares her interview with a CISS faculty affiliate, revealing the inspiration for their research, their latest projects, their favorite teaching experience at BU, and more.
December 2024: Dr. Christine Slaughter
Dr. Christine M. Slaughter is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. She received her Ph.D. in 2021 from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Before joining the department, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, and the University of California, Irvine. Her research examines African American politics, with a focus on how economic inequality, gender, and psychological resources such as resilience influence the frequency and substance of African American political engagement and behavior. Her research has been published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, PS: Politics and Political Science, and PHILLIS: The Journal for Research on African American Women (PHILLIS). She is the author of forthcoming book chapters focused on intersectionality in political behavior. Her research has been supported by fellowship and grants from the Ford Foundation, the American Political Science Association, and the National Science Foundation. At UCLA, she received support from the Institute of American Cultures and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.
November 2024: Dr. Deborah Carr
October 2024: Dr. Rosella Cappella Zielinski
July 2024: Dr. Sanne Verschuren (Pardee)
Dr. Sanne Verschuren is an assistant professor of International Security at the Pardee School of Global Studies of Boston University. Her areas of expertise include international security, the development and diffusion of military technology, strategic thinking, the intersection between nuclear and conventional capabilities, and the linkages between national security and climate change. She focusses on how states fight war, examining why they construct novel weapon technologies, how they envision fielding such technologies, and why they choose to abandon certain technologies and practices. Before joining Boston University, Professor Verschuren was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Sciences Po’s Center for International Studies, a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a predoctoral research fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Her research has been generously supported by the European Commission, the National Science Foundation, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Belgian American Education Foundation, the Tobin Project, the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, and the Brown Graduate School.
June 2024: Dr. Kathryn D. Coduto (COM)
Kathryn (Katy) Coduto is an assistant professor of media science in the Department of Mass Communication, Advertising and Public Relations, in the College of Communications. She .teaches courses in communication research methods, social media strategy, and communication theory. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication from Ohio State University. She was also awarded a Master’s degree in Journalism and Mass Communication and a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Media from Kent State University. Dr. Coduto researches the intersections of mass media and interpersonal communication, focusing on how individuals use media to connect with each other and make sense of the world around them. Recent studies have investigated compulsive social media use during major news events and the privacy management practices of individuals across a number of communication technologies, including dating applications and social media. Her work has been published in journals including the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Computers in Human Behavior, Political Communication, and the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. She has published in academic journals including Sexuality & Culture, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, and Computers in Human Behavior. Katy has also appeared in the media to discuss her research topics, most recently in The Boston Globe, KCBS San Francisco, and The New York Times. Her first book was released in September 2023: Technology, Privacy, and Sexting: Mediated Sex, from Lexington Books. This book is a deep dive into sexting, including understanding why people do it; the privacy beliefs and worries they have when sharing this content; and the ways they manage the content, both using technology but also trusting their partners. Prior to BU, Dr. Coduto was an assistant professor of communication and media studies at South Dakota State University. Prior to receiving her Ph.D., she worked as a research analyst and strategist for Marcus Thomas LLC, an integrated marketing communications company in Cleveland, Ohio.
May 2024: Professor Ben Pyle (BU School of Law)
Professor Benjamin Pyle teaches and writes in empirical legal studies, employment law, and criminal law, with a focus on how the law influences employment prospects and post-conviction opportunities for people with criminal records. Professor Pyle earned his JD from the University of Michigan, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude and Order of the Coif, an honor society for law school graduates. He was also awarded a Master’s degree and PhD in economics from the University of Michigan. In addition, he earned a BA, Magna Cum Laude, in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) and Mathematics from Claremont McKenna College. He has published work in law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the Notre Dame Law Review and the International Review of Law and Economics. His research has won several prizes, including The University of Chicago’s Donald M. Ephraim Prize in Law and Economics and The John E. Parker Memorial Prize in Labor Economics and Human Resources. In addition to theoretical and methodological contributions, Professor Pyle’s scholarly contributions have been relevant to legal practice. His work has been cited by advocates, judicial opinions, and policy makers. His work has been featured in the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers journal, the Champion Magazine, as part of its Getting Scholarship Into the Courtroom Project. Professor Pyle’s work has been supported by grants from the Vital Projects Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the University of Michigan. Learn more about Professor Pyle in his full interview here.
April 2024: Dr. Andreana Cunningham (CAS Archaeology, Anthropology, and African American & Black Diaspora Studies)
Andreana (Andree) Cunningham is an anthropologist whose interdisciplinary research integrates bioarchaeological and archival evidence to examine the biosocial effects of the slave trade. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Florida in 2023. She is interested in the patterns of variation that existed for enslaved people in regions that are not traditionally placed in dialogue. These regions include theCaribbean, South Atlantic Ocean, and Indian Ocean. Her research also examines the ways that these sites of the slave trade can be used to reimagine theory and practice around heritage preservation and community engagement. Her studies use archaeology as a tool for anthropological research regarding the forced migration of Africans and their descendants through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. She aims to identify how complex slave trade routes and modes of enslavement have given rise to diverse and distinct biological and social outcomes for diaspora groups. Andree has conducted fieldwork centered around non-invasive osteology (i.e., the scientific study of bones), archival analysis, and community-based efforts in the U.S., St. Helena, and South Africa. One of her current research projects includes working with artists in Saint Helena to create portraits to commemorate individuals whose remains were carefully excavated from formerly enslaved burial grounds in the South Atlantic region. Learn more about Professor Cunningham in her full interview here.
March 2024: Dr. Jilene Chua (CAS History)
Dr. Jilene A. C. Chua is a cultural historian of Asian/American history. Dr. Chua received her BA in Biology/Africana Studies from the University of Washington (Seattle) in 2014. After receiving her masters in History & Literature from Columbia University in 2015, she completed her second masters in History at l’Université Paris 1-Pantheon Sorbonne in 2016. Most recently, she completed a PhD in History at Johns Hopkins University in 2023. She was born in Manila (the capital city of the Philippines) and mostly grew up in Richland, Washington. Her research on twentieth-century Philippines intersects the US empire, Chinese migration, Southeast Asia, and comparative racialization. Her current project uses legal sources, oral histories, and community archives to access stories of Chinese migrants living under US colonial rule in the Philippines. This research has benefitted from her background as a Philippine Hokkien speaker; time she spent re-learning Tagalog at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI); and from being a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies in Kyoto University (Japan) and at the Ateneo de Manila University (Philippines). Her project has received support from the Fulbright Program, the American Society for Legal History, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, among others. She teaches courses related to Asian/American history, US empire, the Philippines, and comparative racial regimes. Learn more about Professor Chua in her full interview here.
February 2024: Dr. Andrew Stokes (BU SPH)
Andrew C. Stokes, PhD is a demographer and sociologist with expertise in population health, aging, and mortality. Dr. Stokes received his B.A. in Environmental Studies from Bates College, M.A. in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania, and PhD in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to his doctoral studies, he completed post-bachelor fellowships at the Harvard Initiative for Global Health in Cambridge, MA, and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, WA. Through his research and dissemination efforts, he strives to reveal the social and structural factors that influence health across the life course, inform public health policies that center health equity, and contribute to evidence-based reforms of public health and health care systems. His research portfolio includes research on (1) the determinants of long-term mortality and life expectancy trends, (2) international comparisons of health and mortality, (3) chronic disease, pain, and disability across the life course, and (4) the non-communicable disease burden and management in low- and middle-income countries. His methodological interests include spatial-temporal analysis, quasi-experimental methods, and demographic and computational modeling. His peer reviewed research includes articles in PLOS Medicine and Science Advances, his media collaborations include a piece in Missouri Independent and USA Today, and he has numerous published commentaries such as a recent news piece in The Hill and The Conversation. Check out Stokes’ data dashboard on the monthly excess mortality across counties in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020-2022 here. Learn more about Professor Stokes in his full interview here.
January 2024: Dr. Spencer Piston (CAS Political Science)
Spencer Piston is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University. He received his PhD in 2014 from the University of Michigan. His research examines the politics of oppression in the United States, focusing on race, class, public opinion, political behavior, elections, the welfare state, and the criminal justice system. Piston is the author of Class Attitudes in America, which was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press. His scholarship has also been published or accepted for publication in many leading social science journals, including The American Political Science Review, Du Bois Review, Electoral Studies, The Journal of Politics, and more. His scholarship has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, the Maxwell School’s Campbell Institute at Syracuse University, and the Initiative on Cities as well as the Institute for Health System Innovation & Policy at Boston University. Learn more about Professor Piston in his full interview here.
December 2023: Dr. Benjamin Siegel (CAS History)
Benjamin Siegel is a historian of modern economic life and politics, agriculture, and the environment, with a geographic focus on South Asia and its entanglements with the wider world. Dr. Siegel received his B.A. from Yale University and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University; his dissertation won the 2014 Sardar Patel Award given by the Center for India and South Asia at UCLA, honoring “the best doctoral dissertation on any aspect of modern India.” Professor Siegel is currently working on three interlinked future projects: a short history of tangible and intangible resources in modern India, a global history of South Asian development, and a project on traffic, roads, and automobiles in the region. Professor Siegel’s work has been published in the American Historical Review, the Caravan, the Christian Science Monitor, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Contemporary South Asia, Environmental History, Humanity, the Indian Economic Social and History Review, the International History Review, Modern Asian Studies, the World Policy Journal, VICE, and other journals and edited volumes. His work has been sponsored by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center, and the Boston University Center for the Humanities. Learn more about Professor Siegel in his full interview here.
November 2023: Dr. Katherine Levine Einstein (CAS Political Science)
Katherine Levine Einstein, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Political Science Department, joined Boston University in 2012 after receiving her Ph.D. in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests broadly include urban politics and policy, racial and ethnic politics, and American public policy. She is a member of the editorial board of the Urban Affairs Review, and a faculty affiliate of Boston University’s Initiative on Cities, Hariri Institute for Computing and Computation Science & Engineering, and Department of African American Studies. Levine Einstein is also currently co-principal investigator of the Menino Survey of Mayors, a multi-year survey of U.S. mayors exploring a wide spectrum of political and policy issues. Her work has been published in a variety of outlets, including the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Political Behavior, Political Science Quarterly, and Urban Affairs Review. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, The Boston Foundation, and Community Solutions. Learn more about Professor Levine Einstein in her full interview here.
October 2023: Dr. Daniel Jacobson López (BU SSW)
Daniel Jacobson López, an expert in trauma, joined BU School of Social Work as an assistant professor in 2021. He is also a visiting faculty member at Yale University’s School of Public Health and a BU Diversity & Inclusion STAR scholar. His research examines the experiences of gay Latino and Black sexual assault survivors and services provided to them; violence against gay Black and Latino men, and LGBTQ individuals; and COVID-19’s effects on people living with HIV/AIDS. Most recently, he traveled to Ghana with the Yale School of Nursing to reduce stigma and increase HIV testing among men who have sex with men (MSM). Prior to joining BUSSW, Jacobson López was a postdoctoral associate at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, where he was a Career Education and Enhancement for Health Care Research Diversity (CEED) Scholar. He was the first ever Latinx PhD graduate at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work and is the founder of the University’s first Latinx graduate student group. In 2020, he became the inaugural chair of diversity and inclusion for the University of Pittsburgh Postdoctoral Association. Learn more about Professor Jacobson López in his full interview here.
September 2023: Dr. Ian Sue Wing (CAS Earth & Environment)
Ian Sue Wing is a Professor in the Department of Earth & Environment at Boston University. He conducts research and teaching on the economic analysis of energy and environmental policy, with an emphasis on climate change and computational general equilibrium (CGE) analysis of economic adjustment to policy and natural environmental shocks. His current research focuses on characterizing the broader economic consequences of climate change impacts in a variety of areas (energy systems, agriculture and forestry, and human health), assessing the implications for society’s capacity to mitigate future emissions of greenhouse gasses, and simulating the regional economic impacts of natural disasters. He has been supported by grants from the California Energy Commission, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). He has been a member of advisory and review panels for the DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Research Council and NSF, and served as a contributing author to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report and the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment. Learn more about Professor Sue Wing in his full interview here.
August 2023: Dr. Nazli Kibria (CAS Sociology)
Professor Nazli Kibria is Professor of Sociology and the Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. She received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College and her PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of migration, race, family, and childhood with a focus on South Asia and the Asian American experience. Her current projects include research on experiences of economic decline in families and on the negotiation of adult sibling relationships across divisions of social class, immigration, and citizenship. From her earliest writings on refugee families to a recent paper on immigrant mothers of children with disabilities, the study of family life has been a central theme in her career. Professor Kibria has approached this topic from an understanding of “the family” as a dynamic, contested and variable social institution that offers a powerful window into the interactions of larger social forces with human experiences of intimacy, love, care, trust, responsibility, dependence, interdependence and more. Learn more about Professor Kibria in her full interview here.
July 2023: Dr. Ray Fisman (CAS Economics)
Ray Fisman, Professor of Economics (College of Arts and Sciences), holds the Slater Family Chair in Behavioral Economics at Boston University. Prior to joining the Economics Department at BU, he was the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and co-director of the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School l. Professor Fisman’s research—focused on political economy and behavioral economics—has been published in leading economics journals including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. His work has been widely covered in the popular press, in such outlets as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, and The Washington Post. His most recent book, Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do about It (co-authored by Amy Finkelstein and Liran Einav), was published by Yale University Press in January 2023. Learn more about Professor Fisman in his full interview here.
June 2023: Dr. Phillipe Copeland (BU School of Social Work)
Dr. Phillipe Copeland is a Clinical Associate Professor at the Boston University School of Social Work. He is a public scholar, educator, writer, speaker, trainer, facilitator, consultant and digital activist. Dr. Copeland’s personal mission is a world without racism. Two fundamental questions animate his efforts:
- What do people need to learn in order to solve the problem of racism?
- What are the best ways to help people learn these things?
Dr. Copeland’s interdisciplinary approach to these questions spans a number of subjects including abolition, decarceration, health justice, racial trauma, racism denial, and antiracism through culture and narratives.
Dr. Copeland has served as co-leader of the Promote Smart Decarceration (PSD) Grand Challenge as part of the Grand Challenges for Social Work, an initiative of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and a founding member of the first-ever Racial Justice Council of the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW-MA). In addition, he has served as an advisory committee member for the Racial Reconciliation and Healing Project at Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center and a community advisory board member of the Master in Public Health Program at Simmons University. Dr. Copeland has as the Faculty Lead for Education and Training at the BU Center Antiracist Research where he developed and co-led the Designing Antiracist Curricula (DAC) Fellowship. His digital activism includes participating in movements against conservative efforts to mandate miseducation, K-college such as #TeachTruth and against book bans such as #UnitedAgainstBookBans. Learn more about Professor Copeland in his full interview here.
May 2023: Dr. Christopher Robertson (BU School of Law)
Professor Christopher Robertson joined the BU Law faculty in 2020 as a tenured professor and N. Neal Pike Scholar in Health & Disability Law. He is also a Professor of Health Law, Policy & Management in the BU School of Public Health. Professor Robertson is an expert in health law, institutional design, and decision making. His wide-ranging work includes torts, bioethics, professional responsibility, conflicts of interests, criminal justice, evidence, the First Amendment, racial disparities, and corruption. Robertson is author of the 2019 book Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance is Incomplete and What Can be Done About It (Harvard University Press). He has also co-edited three additional books, Nudging Health: Behavioral Economics and Health Law (2016), Blinding as a Solution to Bias: Strengthening Biomedical Science, Forensic Science, and Law (2016), and Innovation and Protection: The Future of Medical Device Regulation (2022). Learn more about Professor Robertson in his full interview here.
April 2023: Krishna Dasaratha (CAS Economics)
Krishna Dasaratha is an Assistant Professor in Economics at Boston University. His research is primarily in microeconomic theory with a focus on social and economic networks, including diffusion processes, social learning, and network formation. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in March 2021. Between 2020-21, Dasaratha was a Warren Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and during the academic year 2021-22, he was a Cowles Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. In 2020, he was awarded the Aliprantis Prize by the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory for a paper on “Innovation and Strategic Network Formation.” More recently, Dasaratha has been featured in a number of prestigious academic journals including the Review of Economic Studies, Games and Economic Behavior, Theoretical Economics, Journal of Integer Sequences, and the International Journal of Number Theory. Learn more about Professor Dasaratha in his full interview here.
March 2023: Thomas Byrne (SSW Social Welfare Policy)
Thomas Byrne believes that everyone should have a safe, stable and comfortable place to live—and in fact, that it is a fundamental prerequisite for a fulfilling and dignified life. This conviction motivates both his scholarship and professional service. His research focuses on homelessness, housing and veterans and has been published in journals including Health Affairs, American Journal of Public Health and Housing Policy Debate. Outside of BU, Byrne serves as an investigator for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Center for Healthcare Outcomes & Implementation Research (CHOIR) in Bedford, Mass., and at the National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans. He is also active in a number of initiatives to prevent and end homelessness in Massachusetts. He serves on the board of directors at Hearth, Inc., a Boston-based organization dedicated to eliminating homelessness among the elderly through prevention, placement and housing programs, and on the City of Boston’s Mayor’s Advisory Committee to End Homelessness. Previously, Byrne was a member of the ad hoc Committee to Estimate Housing Need for Massachusetts for the State Interagency Council on Homelessness and the data working group for the City of Boston Strategic Planning Group to Prevent and End Youth & Young Adult Homelessness. Learn more about Professor Byrne in his full feature here.
February 2023: Japonica Brown-Saracino (CAS Sociology)
Japonica Brown-Saracino is an ethnographer who specializes in urban and community sociology, cultural sociology, and the study of gender and sexualities. Recent projects include an ethnography of dyke bar commemoration in four U.S. cities, with related articles published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies (2020) and American Journal of Sociology (2021). The 2021 article received honorable mention for best article from the Community and Urban Section of the ASA. With collaborators, Brown-Saracino recently published a study of museum representations of gender and sexualities, and, with Robin Bartram, she is at work on a study of gender and housing. Brown-Saracino has served as Vice-President of the Eastern Sociological Society, and as chair of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. She currently serves on the Culture Council of the American Sociological Association, as an associate editor of Social Problems, and as a member of the ASR editorial board. At BU she serves as Chair of Sociology and directs the Urban Inequalities Workshop, which is sponsored by the Initiative on Cities, where she serves as a Faculty Fellow. Learn more about Professor Brown-Saracino in her full feature here!
January 2023: Steven Sandage (STH Religion, CAS Psychology)
Steven J. Sandage, MDiv, PhD (Counseling Psychology), LP, is the Albert and Jessie Danielsen Professor of Psychology of Religion and Theology at Boston University and research director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Psychology. He also serves as visiting faculty in the psychology of religion at MF Norwegian School of Theology (Oslo). Dr. Sandage does research in the areas of positive psychology, psychology of religion, intercultural competence and social justice, psychotherapy processes and outcome, psychopathology, and clinical training. He also practices as a Licensed Psychologist with clinical specializations that include couple and family therapy, multicultural therapy, and spiritually-integrative therapy. He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Psychology, Psychotherapy, and the Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care and received the Narramore Award for excellence in the integration of psychology and theology from the Christian Association of Psychological Studies. His books include The Skillful Soul of the Psychotherapist, Forgiveness and Spirituality: A Relational Approach, Relational Spirituality in Psychotherapy: Healing Suffering and Promoting Growth, and more. Learn more about Professor Sandage in his full feature here.
December 2022: Neha Gondal (CAS Sociology, Computing & Data Sciences)
Dr. Neha Gondal is an assistant professor in the sociology and computing and data sciences departments at Boston University. Her primary research interests lie in exploring the relationship between social networks and culture and its role in the production and maintenance of social inequalities. Professor Gondal employs cutting edge statistical techniques for modeling social networks including varieties of exponential random graph models (ERGM) and agent-based modeling (ABM) to study diverse contexts such as elite consolidation through money-lending ties in Renaissance Florence, inequalities in academic communities evident in citation and hiring networks, and the clustering of unhealthy outcomes in Boston’s public housing developments. Recently, Professor Gondal’s work has been funded by the National Institute of Health and published in prominent academic journals including Social Forces and Social Networks. Learn more about Dr. Gondal in her full feature here!
November 2022: Tanya Rouleau Whitworth (CAS Sociology)
Dr. Tanya Rouleau Whitworth is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Innovation in Social Science (CISS), working with professor of sociology and CISS Director Dr. Deborah Carr. She studies health, education, sexuality, and family relationships across the life course. She uses a diversity of statistical methods in her research and also enjoys collaborating on mixed methods and interdisciplinary projects. Her work has been published in Journal of Marriage and Family, Gender & Society, and Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. Her dissertation (2022) examined race, class, and gender differences in college students’ receipt of support from their parents and the implications of that support for degree completion. Learn more about Dr. Rouleau Whitworth’s research and publications at her website and in a her full feature here!
October 2022: Jacob Bongers (CAS Archaeology)
Dr. Jacob Bongers is anthropological archaeologist who received a Ph.D. in archaeology from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA in 2019. He employs multidisciplinary methodologies built around archaeological science and digital archaeology to investigate how Indigenous communities confront social and environmental change. His doctoral research examined how groups configured ritualized behaviors to deal with imperial conquest in southern Peru. His current research explores how Indigenous communities in highland and coastal Peru mitigate climatic hazards and conflict in everyday life. Prior to joining BU, Bongers conducted archaeological fieldwork in Portugal, Chile, Ethiopia, Oman, and Peru. Learn more about Dr. Bongers’s background and current work in an interview with CISS communications intern Lily Belisle.
September 2022: Michelle Amazeen (COM Mass Communication; Advertising; PR)
Dr. Michelle A. Amazeen is Director of the Communication Research Center and an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication, Advertising and Public Relations in the College of Communication. Her research program examines mediated persuasion and misinformation. Working at the intersection of journalism studies, media effects, and political communication, she explores the nature and persuasive effects of misinformation and efforts to correct misinformation. She uses qualitative and quantitative methods to yield results with practical applications for journalists, educators, policy makers, and consumers who strive to foster recognition of and resistance to persuasion and misinformation in media.
August 2022: Michel Anteby (QST Management & Organizations; CAS Sociology)
Michel Anteby is a professor of management & organizations at Questrom School of Business and sociology/CAS (by courtesy). He co-leads Boston University’s Precarity Lab. His research looks at how individuals relate to their work, their occupations, and the organizations they belong to. He examines the practices people engage in at work that help them sustain their chosen cultures or identities. In doing so, his research contributes to a better understanding of how these cultures and identities come to be and manifest themselves. His has appeared in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Organization Science, Social Science & Medicine, and Social Forces. He also is the author of two monographs: a study of illegal factory production titled Moral Gray Zones: Side Productions, Identity, and Regulation in an Aeronautics Plant and an ethnography faculty socialization at the Harvard Business School titled Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education. Read the full feature here.
July 2022: Charles Chang (CAS Linguistics)
Charles Chang is an associate professor of linguistics. with affiliations at the Center for the Study of Asia and Hearing Research Center. He teaches courses related to language acquisition and linguistic theory and directs the Phonetics, Acquisition & Multilingualism Lab (PAMLab). His research addresses topics in phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, and language development. His specific interests include the early stages of second language (L2) and third language (L3) phonological acquisition, the structure of phonetic and phonological representations, linguistic plasticity, cross-linguistic interactions within the bilingual/multilingual mind, bases of perceived cross-linguistic similarity, second language speech processing, heritage language phonology, and contact-induced sound change. Read the full feature here.
June 2022: Heba Gowayed (CAS Sociology)
Heba Gowayed is an assistant professor of sociology. Her research, which is global and comparative, examines how low-income people traverse social services, immigration laws, and their associated bureaucracies while grappling with gender and racial inequalities. Dr. Gowayed’s new book Refuge, is an ethnography exploring the lives of Syrians seeking refuge in the United States, Canada, and Germany. In it she examines whether and how these countries recognize and invest in new arrivals’ humanity and potential, shaping their economic realities and feelings of belonging. As countries receive refugees through their social welfare systems, Refuge raises a mirror to how these systems (re)produce social inequality. Read the full feature here.
May 2022: Steven Rosenzweig (CAS Political Science)
Steven Rosenzweig is an assistant professor of political science. He studies comparative politics and the political economy of development, with a focus on political violence, electoral accountability, and African politics. He is a co-coordinator of the Research in Comparative Politics Workshop. Dr. Rosenzweig’s book project investigates the logic of violence in electoral competition, analyzing why politicians use violence as an electoral tactic and how it affects voting behavior. Current projects include researching the effects of party primaries in developing democracies and the impact of a program to strengthen American democracy through partisan depolarization. Read the full feature here.
April 2022: Luke Glowacki (CAS Anthropology)
Luke Glowacki is an assistant professor of anthropology and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Innovation in Social Science. He studies the evolution of complex social behavior, including cooperation and war. Dr. Glowacki has done extensive fieldwork among nomadic pastoralists along the Ethiopian / South Sudanese border studying inter-ethnic violence. Read the full feature here.
March 2022: Ana Villarreal (CAS Anthropology)
Dr Ana Villarreal, assistant professor of sociology and CISS affiliate, joined the BU faculty in 2016, after earning her PhD in sociology at University of California-Berkeley. Her book manuscript The Armored City: Violence and Seclusion in the Mexican Metropolis reveals how increased violent crime prompts the concentration of urban wealth and public security at the city level to the detriment of larger metropolitan areas. Read the full feature here.
Please nominate a colleague (or yourself!) to be a future Featured Affiliate!