University of Dallas Assistant Professor of English Sarah Berry aims to explain the 21st-century resurgence of Anglophone verse drama in her new book, Staging the Lyric: Modern and Contemporary Experiments with Verse Drama (Bloomsbury, 2024). This modern verse drama differs from its ancient and Elizabethan antecedents as it is understood not as a genre in its own right, but as a hybrid of the lyric and the dramatic. While they differ in their ideology and form, Berry contends that they are united by exploring the relationship between lyric and dramatic elements on stage and what these two different modes afford. To demonstrate this continuity, Staging the Lyric traces a genealogy from contemporary plays by Joanna Laurens, Joyelle McSweeney, and David Grieg back to W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, to reveal that the tensions that animate verse drama have stayed the same, even as the strategies for staging them have evolved. Berry graduated from Boston College with a master’s degree in English in 2012. She has published articles in Literature/Film Quarterly, Journal of Modern Literature, Christianity and Literature, and Twentieth Century Literature as well as reviews in Modern Drama and Modernism/Modernity.
Staging the Lyric
After the fighting
During the civil war that ravaged Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002, an estimated 20,000 children were forced to join the fighting where they were ordered to kill a friend, relative, or neighbor under threat of being killed themselves. Boston College researcher Theresa Betancourt, the Salem Professor in Global Practice in the School of Social Work, has followed hundreds of these former child soldiers for more than two decades. Her study and the insights it offers on mental health and resilience are the focus of a new book, Shadows into Light: A Generation of Former Child Soldiers Comes of Age (Harvard University Press, 2025). Filled with vivid personal stories, Shadows into Light depicts heartbreak and despair, but also remarkable triumphs. According to Betancourt, the lives of the former child soldiers were shaped not just by their personal ordeals but also, crucially, by the responses of their families, peers, and broader communities. Read more in this author Q&A from BC News.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged mental health, resilience, School of Social Work, trauma
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Money, marketing, and art
“Art is a central aspect of human societies, yet few people know how the art market functions. The most prominent aspects of the art world, including galleries, museums, media attention, and even critical acclaim, are actually shaped by buyers and those who cater to buyers, whereas artists tend to play a secondary role,” says BC Carroll School of Management Associate Professor of Marketing Henrik Hagtvedt, author of the new book Money and Marketing in the Art World (Routledge, 2024). Drawing on a combination of marketplace observations, marketing insights, and research findings, Money and Marketing in the Art World reveals that the art world is primarily shaped by money and marketing, not by art and artists. Prior to entering academe, Hagtvedt studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy and worked full time as an artist, exhibiting his work in Europe and Asia. Read more in BC News.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged art, Carroll School of Management, marketing
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Inspired by her grandmother
White Mulberry is a new historical novel written by 1994 Boston College Law School graduate Rosa Kwon Easton. Inspired by the life of Easton’s grandmother, White Mulberry is a moving portrait of Miyoung, a young girl who leaves an impoverished village in Korea in the 1930s to seek a better future in Japan. As she tries to forge a new identity in a new country, she faces racial prejudice and other obstacles. As war looms, Miyoung feels the constraints of her adopted home tighten and is faced with a choice that will change her life—and the lives of those she loves—forever. A native of Seoul, Korea, Easton is an attorney and elected trustee of the Palos Verdes Library District in California. White Mulberry is Easton’s debut novel. Learn more in this Q&A with the author.
Loneliness: A Theological Appraisal
Theologian Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the University of Oxford and Extraordinary Professor of Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology at the University of Stellenbosch, will present the Candlemas Lecture “Loneliness: A Theological Appraisal” at Boston College on February 5 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall 100. Ward’s publications include Cities of God, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice, True Religion, Christ and Culture, The Politics of Discipleship, Unbelievable, and Unimaginable. For the last 10 years he has been working on Ethical Life, a four-volume set on systematic theology from Oxford University Press. Two of the volumes, How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal, have been published. Ward’s talk is presented by BC’s Lowell Humanities Series and cosponsored by the BC Theology Department. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Catholic women preaching
Catholic Women Preach: Raising Voices, Renewing the Church (Orbis Books, 2024) is the third installment of a series of books featuring homilies offered by Catholic women from around the world on the Gospel readings for Sundays and holy days. The volumes have been co-edited by Elizabeth Donnelly and Boston College graduate Russ Petrus. The most recent volume is for Cycle C in the Catholic Lectionary. BC faculty, alumnae, and student contributors to this volume of Catholic Women Preach are Kayla August; M. Shawn Copeland; Brenna Davis; Emily Rauer Davis; Melinda Brown Donovan; Colleen Gibson, SSJ; Margaret Eletta Guider, OSF; Kristin Heyer; Valerie Lewis-Mosley; Catherine Mooney; Barbara Quinn, RSCJ; Jane Regan; and Elizabeth Turnwald.
The Boston game
On Boston Common stands a monument dedicated to the Oneida Football Club. It honors the site where, in the 1860s, 16 boys played what was then called the “Boston game”—an early version of football in the United States. In the 1920s, a handful of them donated artifacts to museums, deposited self-penned histories into libraries and archives, and erected memorials, all to elevate themselves as the inventors of American football. But was this origin story as straightforward as they made it seem? In the new book Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin investigate the history of the Oneida Football Club. In a compelling narrative informed by sports history, Boston history, and the study of memory, the authors posit that these men engaged in self-memorialization to reinforce their elite cultural status during a period of tremendous social and economic change, and particularly increased immigration. An internationally renowned historian, Cronin is the academic director of Boston College Ireland. His publications include Places We Play: Ireland’s Sporting Heritage; A History of Ireland; and The Routledge Handbook of Irish Studies. Update: Read an interview with Cronin via BC News.
What pandemics teach us
Ed Yong, who was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, will present “What Pandemics Teach Us” at Boston College on January 29 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall 100. Yong also has been honored for his writing with a 2020 George Polk Award for science reporting and a 2022 Benton Award for Distinguished Public Service. He is the author of the bestselling books An Immense World, a comprehensive look at the sensory worlds of animals, and I Contain Multitudes, a groundbreaking examination of the relationship between animals and microbes. A staff writer at The Atlantic from 2015 to 2023, Yong has also written for National Geographic, The New Yorker, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, and Scientific American. Yong’s lecture, the Gerson Family Lecture, is presented by BC’s Lowell Humanities Series and cosponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series, Boston College Asian American Studies Program, and Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Higher education in the British Atlantic world
The Universities of Scotland, Ireland and New England during the British Civil Wars: Contested Seminaries (Boydell Press, 2024), written by Boston College alumnus Salvatore Cipriano, provides new insight into the contested nature of higher education in the British Atlantic world between the Reformation and the Enlightenment and corrects outmoded notions about the universities’ purported insularity and intellectual poverty. In Cipriano’s volume, the image that emerges of these universities is one of genuine academies of strategic importance, employed to serve the agendas of ruling powers in Scotland, Ireland, and New England. Trinity College, Dublin, Harvard College, and the Scottish universities existed on the frontiers of a deteriorating composite monarchy with a centralizing impulse, becoming battlegrounds of the mid-17th-century’s intellectual, political, and religious conflicts. Cipriano earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Boston College. He is an associate director of career coaching and education at Stanford University.
The book of love
Love: A History (Oxford University Press, 2024), edited by BC Moakley Professor of Political Science Ryan Patrick Hanley, traces the history of thinking about love from antiquity to the 20th century, and includes how various literary, cultural, and political representations of love supplement the history of philosophical reflection. According to the publisher, Love: A History “chronicles the most significant moments in this concept’s long and remarkable evolutionary life, ranging from ancient Hebrew and Greek and Christian conceptions of love to those advanced by thinkers from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Levinas.” As an interconnected story, the volume also tells a story the ways in which love’s horizons shifted from the transcendent to the immanent.
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