September 2025 department news updates
A new semester and academic year have begun and our BU Sociology faculty, students, post-docs, and alumni are as busy as ever! We have returned to a full Fall Seminar Series which we kicked off this week with Courtney Boen from Brown University. Now we’re looking forward to joining forces with The Newbury Center on October 8th for Melissa Osborne’s (Western Washington University) book talk Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility.
There are also exciting department-affiliated workshops happening throughout the Fall semester including The Urban Inequalities Workshop, Global Health Politics Workshop, and The Precarity & Inequality Lab.
Now on to our September department news updates…
Debby Carr is giving the 2025 Gitner Family Lecture today 3:00! What will it be like to be part of the aging population in 2050? What impact will this have on our society? Professor Carr will answer these questions during her lecture “The Golden Years? Growing Old in the 21st Century,” from 3 to 4:30 pm, in CDS 1750.
Saida Grundy has published two recent articles for The Guardian. “Trump’s attacks on the ‘Blacksonian’ have a history in a century-old myth” details how The United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to make slavery respectable again by promoting ‘the lost cause’. And most recently: “Charlie Kirk was a divisive far-right podcaster. Why is he being rebranded as a national hero?” Professor Grundy was also quoted in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education article “Charlie Kirk’s Watchlist Made Some Professors’ Lives a ‘Living Hell’“.
Jonathan Mijs was quoted in the recent Boston Globe article “Wealthy households are driving Boston’s rising income segregation. Here’s how.”
Pamela Zabala Ortiz published a new paper “#PeroNoSomosRacistas: examining Dominican (anti)blackness in a time of global racial reckoning” in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Tatiana Padilla finished her postdoctoral fellowship with CISS this month and co-authored the paper with Chiara Galli (University of Chicago) “Deporting children: case outcomes for unaccompanied minors in U.S. immigration court” in Social Forces.
Taylor Beauvais co-authored a paper with former BU Sociology faculty Ashley Mears in Social Problems. “Learning to Like the Likes and the Hate: The Labor of Internet Fame in the New Attention Economy” based on interviews they did with people who go viral for a living.
And congratulations to Bahar Aldanmaz, Elif Birced, Stuti Das, and Kit Man, our recent doctoral graduates who defended their dissertations over the Summer! Bahar has started a new career working for Turkish Philanthropy Funds in New York City, Elif has begun a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, and Stuti has stayed at BU as a postdoc at CISS.