Boston University College of Arts & Sciences

Meet Ria McGuire (Boston University College of Arts & Sciences’25), Student CEO of Saxbys café inside the CDS building. We talked to McGuire about her responsibilities, her time at BU, and how this experience will aid her as she prepares to graduate. Her story ?? https://spr.ly/6040s709p

#FacultyFriday: Meet our new Sociology faculty! Sarah Miller, Assistant Professor of Sociology, in joint appointment with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University. Her work contributes to sociological scholarship on gender, sexuality, race, youth, education, and new media. Jane Pryma, Assistant Professor of Sociology, is a sociologist of health and medicine who explores how politics, medical technologies, and human rights shape what we know about pain and disability. Vance Puchalski, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology focuses on the separate and unequal world of financial services that persists in post-civil rights America. Jyothi Puri, Professor of Sociology, is a feminist sociologist whose research and teaching are enriched by the intersections of sociology, sexuality and queer studies, critical death studies, and postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial theories. Pamela Zabala Ortiz, Assitant Professor of Sociology, is a sociologist of race & ethnicity with a focus on migration, identity-formation, and Latinx communities in the U.S. Her research has focused on Afro-Latinidad, questions of race and racism within Latinx spaces, and constructions and contestations of Blackness in the U.S. and Latin America. Learn more about our new faculty here: https://lnkd.in/eSNh6GW8

#FacultyFriday: Meet our new Romance Studies faculty! Pau Ca?igueral Batllosera, Lecturer in Spanish, teaches courses on medieval and early modern Iberian literatures, with a specialization in the cultural exchanges in the Western Mediterranean. His research interests include Mediterranean Studies, medieval theories of hermeneutics and authorship, brief-narratives collections and translation. His first book project, Boccaccio and the Cultural Hybridity of the Neapolitan Court of Alfonso the Magnanimous (c. 1442-58), examines the role of Boccaccio’s opere minori in the multi-lingual literary production during the Aragonese age of the Kingdom of Naples. M?nica Carvalho Gimenes, Visiting Assistant Professor in Spanish & Portuguese, received her PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley. She holds an M.A. in Spanish and a B.A. in Multimedia Studies: Journalism from Florida Atlantic University. Her teaching and research interests include 20th and 21st century Latin American narrative, crime fiction, body politics, transnational feminisms, and decolonial theories. Her dissertation examines femicidal violence and feminist resistance in the Southern Cone (including Brazil). Esteban Crespo Jamarillo, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish, received his PhD from the Early Modern Studies Program and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale. His research focuses on the history of gender and sexuality in the early modern Iberian worlds in relation to the history of the book, contemporary critical thought, and colonial studies. Esteban’s most recent scholarly contributions have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica or in edited books such as Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World (Edinburgh University Press) and The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production. Esteban is also passionate about reaching audiences beyond academia through his writing and public speaking.

Putting Arts & Sciences into Action: Ruofei Shang (CAS’25), an anthropology major, shares more about her work as an office assistant at the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD). Video by Amber Tai (COM’24)

With 2025 on the horizon, the New Year festivities signify the start of a new year and a new generation: Generation Beta. This new generation represents a group of people, born between 2025 and 2039, who will share a common cultural experience. Good Morning America walks us through the different generations and their distinctions. Director of the BU Center of Innovation in Social Science and A&S Distinguished Professor of Sociology Deborah Carr spoke with Good Morning America to explain the difference between generations and parenting styles, with millennials being more likely to be accepting and encouraging. "Some millennial parents, who were 'helicoptered over' in their youth, are taking on a freer approach to parenting, allowing their children to explore and create without constant structure or supervision.” — Deborah Carr, Good Morning America Read more here: https://lnkd.in/esv8e_w4

In her internship at the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, Mary Snyder (GRS'29), created a database of financial records between laborers and plantation owners that will aid researchers studying sharecropping and the Jim Crow era. Read about the documents she found and their lasting legacy at the link here: https://lnkd.in/e_-Acp5V

#FacultyFriday: Meet our new Religion faculty! Daigengna Duoer, Assistant Professor of Religion, is a historian specializing in religion in modern East and Inner Asia, with a particular focus on transnational Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism in the twentieth century. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University and teaches classes on Buddhism and East Asian religions. She earned her Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and M.A. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Toronto. Her forthcoming book, Buddhism Beyond the Nation and the Empire: Transnational Buddhists in Modern East and Inner Asia, investigates Buddhism’s roles within and beyond the competing nation and empire-building projects that took place in early 20th century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, regions sandwiched between the expansionist ambitions of Republican China, the Japanese Empire, and the Soviet Union. Learn more about our new faculty here: https://lnkd.in/eSNh6GW8

#FacultyFriday: Meet our new Psychological & Brain Sciences faculty! Chloe Jordan, Lecturer in Psychological & Brain Sciences, joined the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Boston University as a Lecturer in January 2024. Dr. Jordan earned her PhD in Psychological & Brain Sciences from Boston University in 2015, and completed her post-doctoral training at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School and the NIDA Intramural Research Program from 2015 to 2019. Following her post-doctoral training, Jordan served as a Project Director of a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Clinical Trials Network study on opioid use disorder treatment, and as a Scientific Program Manager of the Healthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study. Tara Mandalaywala, Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, believes individuals don’t develop in a bubble; they develop in the contexts of families, communities, and cultures. In the Cognition Across Development (CAD) Lab, Mandalaywala asks how variation in experience shapes cognition and behavior across childhood. In particular, she examines how caregivers and communities shape how children begin to think about themselves and others in terms of their race, nationality, or social status. Understanding how and when children develop the belief that certain social categories as special and salient can help us understand the developmental origins of problematic social phenomena, such as stereotyping, prejudice, and inequality. Samuel Meisel, Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, received his PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York in 2020. He completed his pre-doctoral internship at Brown University. Meisel completed a two-year NIAAA-funded F32 postdoctoral fellowship and then a two-year NIAAA-funded K99 postdoctoral fellowship at E. P. Bradley Hospital and Brown University’s Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies. Learn more about our new faculty here: https://lnkd.in/eSNh6GW8

The majority of the world’s food—two-thirds—rely on nine different plants. To maintain agricultural productivity, we rely on seed banks around the world to sustain seeds during periods of crop loss due to climate change. Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault is one of the most significant seed banks in the world, one caught in controversy due to global reliance on it, while shifting agriculture to be technology reliant. Professor of English and Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Chair of Humanities Adriana Craciun writes about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault’s controversy in her piece for The Conversation U.S. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/deViGVCW

Meet Sean Waddington (CAS’25), a double major in sociology and political science at the College of Arts & Sciences. This fall, Sean is an intern at the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and shares a peek into how his internship has enhanced his education at Boston University. Video by Amber Tai (COM’24)