February 2026 department news updates
The Spring 2026 semester is in full swing and our faculty, graduate students, and alums have some exciting updates to share:
Nancy Ammerman is happy to report that she served as guest editor for a special issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, focused on “Religion and Bodies.”
Jyoti Puri has one of the articles in that issue: “Burning Bodies: Religion, Race, and Migrant Funerary Practices in the Early 20th-Century Pacific West.” (JSSR 64(4):375-384). Jyoti has also been appointed Distinguished Fellow (non-resident), Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative, Center for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley. And she will be giving a talk at the BU Center for the Study of Asia on March 18th. Register here by March 13th.
Japonica Brown-Saracino has continued to give talks recently for her new book The Death and Life of Gentrification including at the Harvard Bookstore and the Initiative on Cities Gentrification: Ideas to Action which launch the IOC’s new Gentrification & Urban Displacement Lab.
Joe Harris met with with the Legislative Assistant for Senator Ed Markey and staff at the United States of Care and spoke with them about health reform. These meetings built on earlier meetings with a Congressional candidate and the Senior Legislative Assistant for the co-chair of the biggest bipartisan health reform effort in the House. And Joe’s Global Health Politics Podcast – available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon – broke download records with their conversation with Madhu Pai. And in the most recent episode he interviewed NYTimes best-selling author John Green about his new book, Everything is Tuberculosis. The podcast now reaches listeners in 56 countries!
Neha Gondal was recently cited in the BU Today article “Gender Wage Gap in Greater Boston Narrows, Research from BU and City Finds”. Neha has been published in a number of journals this past year, including Poetics 110C: 102001 (special issue on Duality in the Study of Culture and Society) co-authored with PhD candidate Allison Wigen on “Professor-Writers and Machinist-Painter-Photographers: Investigating the Duality between Occupational Categories and Artistic Hobbies.” Neha’s work has also appeared in BMC Public Health, Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology, and Handbook of Culture and Social Networks. She has also given a number of invited talks from Heidelberg University to The Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science at Linkoping University, Sweden to the Department of Economics at BU.
Loretta Lees was highly commended for the 2025 Wiley Research Heroes Impact Beyond Academia Prize. And last month she co-organized the Multiplied Displacements: The Climate-Housing Nexus Conference with over 150 attendees in New Orleans.
Heather Schoenfeld will be presenting at the Carceral Political Economy Conference at the end of March.
Pamela Zabala Ortiz has a new paper out, “Black like this, not like that: how Afro-Latines navigate Black and Latine ethnoracial hierarchies in the U.S.” in Ethnic and Racial Studies. She has also been selected to be a member of the editorial board for Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
Jane Pryma published the article “Trauma as a Workaround: Recognizing chronic pain as disability without medical documentation in the United States and France” in Social Science & Medicine as part of a special issue on Stratified Medicalization in October 2025.
Saida Grundy published “America’s contract to protect white women has always been tenuous” in The Guardian in the wake of ICE’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good.
Debby Carr and graduate student Sophie Arnold published the chapter “Population and Social Psychology: How Social Psychology Can Shed Light on Demographic Processes” in Handbook of Social Psychology (Springer). Debby also discussed reasons why couples should plot out their plans for the year in USA Today (January 2026), and talked about the class privilege of “wellness culture” with Boston Magazine (January 2026). And Debby is co-investigator on the recently funded National Institute of Aging R03 grant “Social Engagement and Well-Being in the Final Five Years of Life,” with collaborators at Boston College.
Steven Schmidt presented the virtual seminar in the Fall, “Understanding the Cost of Housing Quality on Families and Communities,” sponsored by the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at UW-Madison. The full webinar is here.
And recent PhD alums Ladon Lauder and Elif Birced both have career news to celebrate: Landon recently begun a new position as trainer for the Community Health Education Center of the Boston Public Health Commission. And Elif will be joining Villanova University as an Assistant Professor of Sociology in Fall 2026. Congrats!