Graduate Alumni
Erick Berrelleza is the inaugural Dean of Messina College at Boston College. Previously, he joined the Department of Sociology at Santa Clara University in 2021 as an assistant professor. His research on place and space considers the contestations that occur at the microlevel through interactions, practices, and structures. He uses ethnography, as well as visual and spatial methods in his research. He has studied the broad exclusionary effects of gentrification within an urban church in Boston, MA and the everyday production and practices of sanctuary by undocumented immigrants living in spaces of confinement in the New Sanctuary Movement. His most recent project is a comparative ethnography of Latino religious life in urban and rural North Carolina.
He teaches courses in urban sociology, immigration, and place.