Spring 2025 Department News Highlights
It was a busy Spring! Now that Summer Break is upon us, let’s look back at some recent highlights from this past semester. We are so proud of all the hard work and accomplishments of our incredible Sociology students, faculty, lecturers, staff, and alums:
- First, congrats to the Class of 2025! In case you missed it, Class of 2015 alumna Emma Kalff returned to BU to give the commencement address to our graduating seniors. You can read her full speech here.
- Class of 2025 graduate Ramona Leung was this year’s College Prize winner for our department. You can read the speech Ramona gave at our May 18th ceremony here.
- Big congratulations to our 2025 PhD graduates, Landon Lauder and Leping Wang! Best of luck to you both!
- Tia Perkins (Class of 2025) won the Michael A. Sassano III and Christopher M. Sassano Award for Writing Excellence in the Social Sciences for her thesis “Constructing Queer Futures: How LGBTQ+ Young Adults Navigate Community Care.”
- Outgoing BUUSA president Matt Lutkins (Class of 2025) was awarded the IOC Student Prize for the 2025 school year.
- Sociology freshman Sophie Choong published an op-ed on abortion, race, and the 2024 election for Deerfield: Journal of the CAS Writing Program with an introduction by lecturer Cara Bowman who taught WR120:The Sociology of Code-Switching.
- Luisa Fernanda Delgado-Mejía won the GRS Outstanding Teaching Fellow Award for the Sociology department.
- Ya-Ching Huang’s and Alya Guseva’s article “The Moral Economy of Severe Scarcity: How Considerations of Deservingness Shape Cloth Mask Distribution Practices in the Midst of a Global Health Crisis” won Honorable Mention for the 2025 Consumers and Consumption Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award. Here is the link to the article.
- In exciting faculty news, Celeste Curington, Jonathan Mijs, and Ana Villarreal were all promoted to Associate Professors this month. Congrats!
- Curington was also featured in the BU Brink along with two of her students training as doulas to help inform research on pregnancy and childbirth through an intersectional lens. And her book Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal recently won the ASA’s 2025 Race, Gender, and Class Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award.
- Mijs was featured in BU Today about his role as a technical consultant for Hulu’s hit series Paradise and what that experience was like. He was also interviewed about it for the syndicated program Localish which was picked up by a number of TV networks nationally.
- Villarreal won the CAS 2025 Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching. Her book The Two Faces of Fear recently won the 2025 Outstanding Book Award from the Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA). And she has been awarded a Madero Fellowship to be a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies for 2025-2026.
- Pamela Zabala Ortiz won a CISS Book Incubator Grant for her forthcoming book Black but “not Black”: Dominican Racial Contestations and the Pursuit of Authentic Blackness. She was also awarded awarded the 2025 Dominican Studies Research Fellowship by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. The fellowship comes with $10,000 to support archival research at the Dominican Studies Institute in New York City over the remainder of the year which she’ll use to finish research for the book.
- Sarah Miller won a CISS 2025-26 Pilot Grant for her recent book project, The Tolerance Generation: Growing Up Online in an Anti-Bullying Era. Her research research has also been funded by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the American Sociological Association.
- Loretta Lees won two awards this semester: The Association of American Geographers’ 2025 AAG E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award for her distinguished career in urban geography and the Urban Affairs Association’s (UAA) Contribution to the Field of Urban Affairs Award.
- Jill Walsh won the CAS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Part-Time Teaching.
- Elise St. Esprit won the CAS Outstanding Service Awards for Staff.
- Nancy Ammerman has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
- Heather Schoenfeld published the article “Criminal justice as racialized organizations: Evidence from ethnographies of police, courts, and jails” in the journal Criminology.
- Joe Harris has hosted the Global Health Politics podcast including a recent episode on The Dismantling of U.S. Foreign Aid and the Consequences for Global Health.
- Sara Snitselaar has accepted a position as a postdoctoral research fellow in the TL1 Postdoctoral Program in Clinical Research, Biomedical Informatics, and Health Equity at the University of Chicago’s Center for Health and the Social Sciences. She will begin in July 2025.
- And another PhD alum, Don Gillis, just published a book The Battle for Boston which was recently featuring in the Daily Free Press.
