In his new book, Exploring the Thought of Jane Jacobs: The Conversation of Cities (Hamilton Books, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026), Richard Keeley brings urbanologist Jane Jacobs’ thoughts on cities, nations, and economies into dialogue with today’s urban challenges. Jacobs, who died in 2006, was an influential theorist and activist whose most well-known work is the book The Death and Life Great American Cities. With careful attention to context, Keeley explores Jacobs’ understanding of streets and neighborhoods in cities great and small and her vision of the city as an organism extended through generations. He examines her theories on the dynamics of economic development, the ethics of the workplace, and the difficulties of ethical business practice. The book concludes with a reflection in Jacobsian terms on the need for a politics of place spanning generations. Keeley, who retired from Boston College in 2018, served as Carroll School of Management senior associate dean and director of programs for the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics at Boston College. It was during Keeley’s tenure as director (1975-1991) of BC’s PULSE Program for Service Learning that he stuck up a long-standing correspondence with Jacobs and convinced her to speak at a symposium on campus. She returned to BC multiple times and donated an extensive collection of her papers, which are housed in the Burns Library.
Jane Jacobs
‘Curiosa Americana’
Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister whose name became synonymous with the phrase “witch hunt” for his connection to the notorious Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693, is also known for his contributions to medicine and science, notably his advocacy for smallpox inoculation. Mather’s observations and theories related to natural sciences, astronomy, botany, medicine, and the nascent fields of embryology and epidemiology are the focus of a new book, co-edited by Boston College doctoral student Andrew Juchno. Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana: Scientific Letters to the Royal Society comprises more than 80 letters Mather wrote between 1712 and 1724 to the Royal Society of London, a collection of letters known as Curiosa Americana. Mather’s letters document New England’s flora and fauna, unusual meteorological events, medical advancements and transatlantic scientific discourse, revealing Mather as a pivotal figure in the early Enlightenment, deeply engaged in the era’s defining debates. Co-edited with Georgia State University Professor Emeritus of English Reiner Smolinski and Yale University Jonathan Edwards Center Director Kenneth Minkema, Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana: Scientific Letters to the Royal Society represents the first complete, edited, and annotated collection of Mather’s letters. More from BC News.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged colonial America, History Department, science
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‘Daughter of Egypt’
Daughter of Egypt (St. Martin’s Press, 2026), the latest novel from Boston College grad Marie Benedict, is about Lady Evelyn Herbert, an archaeologist whose relentless curiosity sends her on a quest to find the tomb of Hatshepsut, Egypt’s lost pharaoh. She risks everything to uncover the truth about Hatshepsut’s reign and keep valued artifacts in Egypt. Hatshepsut and Herbert, two women separated by some 3,000 years, both ultimately changed history forever. Benedict is a bestselling author whose previous works include The Queens of Crime, Lady Clementine, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, and, with Victoria Christopher Murray, The Personal Librarian. Benedict was interviewed about her book by CBS News.
A critical look at suburban America
In his book Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), Boston College Assistant Professor of History Michael Glass demonstrates how contemporary issues like the affordable housing crisis and school segregation have their origins in post-World War II suburbanization. Focusing on the archetypal suburbs of Long Island, Cracked Foundations exposes the myth of uniform suburban prosperity, uncovering an American dream built on home mortgages and municipal bonds. Glass further explores how these debt instruments made suburban living financially fragile and entrenched disparities that continue to structure American society. Glass is an urban and political historian of the United States in the 20th century.
‘Yours Always’
Yours Always is the latest novel from Boston College Class of 2014 graduate Corinne Sullivan. Described as a mind-bending tale of dangerous love featuring unreliable narrators, Yours Always is the story of Talia Danvers, an engineer for a high-end dating app, who reconnects with an old boyfriend, Townsend Fuller. Unfortunately, Townsend is the prime suspect in the disappearance of Amanda Reade, the woman who broke up Talia and Townsend in the first place. People warn Talia about Townsend. When Talia starts receiving menacing texts from Amanda, the reader doesn’t know what to believe. Sullivan is the senior news editor at Cosmopolitan, where she covers celebrity and entertainment news. Her first novel was Indecent.
Changemaker
Boston College Lynch School of Education and Human Development Associate Professor Emily F. Gates’ work focuses on the role of evaluation in designing, implementing, and adapting interventions to address complex problems and foster systems change. In a new book, she and co-author Pablo Vidueira critique the “fixed” approach of traditional program evaluation and policy analysis and advance an alternative approach centered on making lasting, transformative change to systems. Evaluative Inquiry for Systemic Change (Sage College Publishing, 2025), demonstrates that systemic change that embeds evaluative inquiry is a theoretically supported, practical way to work toward fundamental social change with lasting impact. The authors offer a clear, five-phase framework for systemic change and a five-element model for evaluative inquiry—ideal for structuring lectures, workshops, and assignments.
Jewish women’s literature
Blending history, collective biography, and literary criticism, the new book West of the Ghetto: Jewish Women, Old San Francisco, and American Literary Culture (Wayne State University Press, 2026) re-positions the American West as a generative space for turn-of-the-20th-century Jewish women’s literature. Author Lori Harrison-Kahan, a professor of the practice in the Boston College English Department, demonstrates that California-based writers Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Harriet Lane Levy, Miriam Michelson, and Anna Strunsky played formative roles in Jewish American literary history. Shaped by ethno-religious, gender, class, and settler-colonial dynamics of San Francisco and the frontier, their works challenge masculinist views of Jewish literature and contrast dramatically with well-known stories of the New York ghetto. Mining print and archival sources (including newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, diaries, and unpublished writings), Harrison-Kahan narrates the obscured lives of these pioneering women and considers how literary communities—from bourgeois women’s clubs to socialist bohemia—sustained them.
Robert Faulkner collection
Robert K. Faulkner (1934-2023), who taught political philosophy at Boston College for more than four decades, is commemorated in a new collection of essays. Comprising 17 studies from every period of Faulkner’s distinguished career, Politics, Progress, and the Constitution: Essays in Political Philosophy (Mercer University Press, 2026) ranges widely through the history of moral, legal, and political thought, from Aristotle to Machiavelli, Plato to Francis Bacon, Xenophon to John Locke, John Marshall to Alexander Bickel. These essays examine the theory and practice of constitutional government, the philosophical foundations of modern republicanism, and the principles of great statesmanship as embodied by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, among others. A beloved teacher and respected scholar, Faulkner was the author of several books, notably The Case for Greatness: Honorable Ambition and Its Critics, The Jurisprudence of John Marshall, and Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress. BC’s Behrakis Professor in Hellenic Political Studies Robert C. Bartlett is editor of Politics, Progress, and the Constitution. More from BC News.
A History of Fionn and the Fianna
The Burns Library at Boston College will host a book launch on April 16 at 5 p.m. for Heroes of the Gael: A History of Fionn and the Fianna (Princeton University Press, 2026) by Natasha Sumner. Fionn macCumhaill (also known as Finn McCool) and his roving warrior band, the Fianna, are the heroes of the most prolific body of narrative in the Gaelic tradition, spanning 1,400 years of oral and written transmission. In Heroes of the Gael, Sumner–a professor at Harvard University and expert in Celtic language and literature–traces these stories across the centuries and throughout the Gaelic world, examining the fates of Fionn and the Fianna and investigating the persistent popularity of these tales. At the BC event, the author will join Geraldine Parsons (University of Glasgow), Ciara Ní Riain (Harvard University) and Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies Ray Cashman (Indiana University Bloomington) for a discussion of Irish folklore. The event is cosponsored by the Irish Studies Program and Burns Library and is free and open to the public.
Posted in Guest Authors
Tagged Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies, folktales, Ireland, Irish literature, Irish Studies
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Peter E. Gordon
Harvard University’s Amabel B. James Professor of History Peter E. Gordon will speak on his new book, Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver (Yale University Press, 2026), at Boston College on April 14 at 5 p.m. in Devlin 101. Gordon, who specializes in modern European intellectual history from the late 18th to the late 20th century, is also Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Department of Government, and Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. A frequent contributor to periodicals such as The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books, Gordon has published major works on Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, and Theodor W. Adorno. The subject of his latest book, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), is widely considered one of the most creative cultural critics of the 20th century. Esteemed for his literary acumen and capacious imagination, Benjamin developed a unique style of criticism―his friend Hannah Arendt called it pearl-diving―that sought out fragments of redemption in the ruins of bourgeois civilization. In his book, Gordon tells Benjamin’s story in a vivid and poetic style, inviting the reader to look beyond the image of Benjamin as a tragic figure of German-Jewish history and portraying him as a complex personality of unique and multifaceted gifts. The event is cosponsored by the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning and the Political Science, German Studies, and Philosophy departments.
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