Spring 2026 department news highlights
Now that May is almost over, we look back on some highlights from another busy semester and all the tremendous accomplishments of our students, faculty and staff.
First, congrats to the Class of 2026! Over 50 undergraduate Sociology majors participated in our convocation ceremony on May 17th. Stay tuned for more photos of the graduates and text of the excellent speeches by our commencement speaker and our undergraduate College Prize Winner Zoe Solberg.
- We are also very proud of our undergraduate academic advisor Marcus Shaw for not only graduating from the Boston University School of Social Work (BUSSW) with his MSW, but also for being selected as the student speaker at the ceremony on May 14th. You can watch Marcus’ powerful speech on social work and liberation online here. Congrats Marcus!
- And congratulations to our 2026 PhD graduates, Allison Wigen and Caoyifu Zhou! Best of luck to you both. Allison and CZ were joined at the May 14th hooding ceremony with 2025 graduates Bahar Aldanmaz and Elif Birced.
Faculty news
- Loretta Lees was featured in The Brink about the Royal Medal she was awarded from the Royal Geographical Society.
- Saida Grundy was one of three finalists for the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Salute to Excellence Awards for National Newspaper Commentary/Essay for her column last year on why Trump is terrified of Black culture in the Guardian. Her latest Guardian columns have included this month’s Conservative justices actually consider race – except in correcting inequality and February’s Jesse Jackson shifted Black politics from the margins of the Democratic party to its center.
- Pamela Zabala Ortiz has a new co-authored paper, “Researcher street race-gender in qualitative field work,” published in Qualitative Research. Pamela presented her research at the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at UMASS-Boston as an Andrés Torres Paper Series awardee. She also was invited to give a workshop titled, “Revolutionary Joy: Drawing on Laughter and Humor as Forms of Critical Resistance” at the annual Women of Color in the Academy Conference. And she gave the keynote address at BU’s 2026 Luz y Exito graduation ceremony for the Latinx community.
- Japonica Brown-Saracino presented her new book The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea in the UK at the London School of Economics earlier this month. The book was also reviewed in Urban Policy and Research.
- Joe Harris was featured on the No Jargon podcast on the topic “What Did We Learn from Covid?” He was also quoted on WBUR and The Daily Free Press about BU’s removal of pride flags from campus offices during Spring Break in March.
- Jessica Simes delivered the guest lecture “From Prison to Community: Racial Inequality and Mass Incarceration” at Northeastern University’s Annual Schulman Distinguished Lecture Series.
- Deborah Carr was quoted in a recent Oprah.com piece on the potential mental benefits of watching reality TV. Debby also co-authored the Social Science & Medicine article “Advance care planning of U.S. older adults with limited family ties: Evaluating the impacts of partnership trajectories and parental statuses.” And earlier in the semester, data was released from ICPSR at the University of Michigan from a study she was an investigator for and which her research was cited: Midlife in the United States (MIDUS Refresher 2), 2022-2024 (ICPSR 39670).
- Jonathan Mijs won a 2026 Book Incubator Grant from CISS for his forthcoming Why You Don’t Care about Inequality. And he published the article “Visualizing Belief in Merit and Privilege, 1930 to 2020: Rejoinder” in
- David Swartz presented “How American Academic Trumpists use the Constitution” at the Faculty of Law, Charles University in Prague earlier in May. The presentation was at a conference on “Impure: the impure science of law: constitutional scholars in democracy” where he joined the discussion with several European professors of constitutional law (notably Jan Komarek, Sheila Jasanoff, Mattias Kumm, Paivi Leino-Sandberg, and Rob van Gestel) about problems of teaching and research in face of growing authoritarianism. And David’s review of Deborah Reed-Danahay, Bourdieu and Social Space: Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements (New York: Berghahn, 2020) will finally appear in French Politics, Culture & Society, 2026, pp. 86-88.
- Peter Yeager has written and published his first journal article since he retired in 2015, co-authored with Sally S. Simpson: “Tracking Data on Corporate Offenses: The Long Road Toward a National Database.” Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, Vol. 7 (1), pp. 5-21, January 2026.
Graduate student news
- Congratulations to recent PhD alum Allison Wigen who has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinarity at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri for the fall. In this new role, Allison will be teaching in the Social Science and Human Inquiry department supporting sociology and anthropology, history, and philosophy, as well as interdisciplinary minors like environmental studies, disability studies, and museum studies.
- Evan Gosen presented at the In_Equality Conference in Konstanz in April with Jonathan Mijs. The title of their presentation was “Approaching Inequality: Knowledge claims and vantage points in everyday conversations about wealth in the United States”. And Evan is presenting his own research this weekend at the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting in San Franciso. The title of that presentation will be “The Shape of Reentry: Applying Social Networks Approaches to Reentry Outcomes”.
- And congrats to Andrew Ward for receiving the CAS Spring 2026 Outstanding Teaching Fellow award.