Professor of English Elizabeth Graver’s critically acclaimed novel, Kantika, is winner of a National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic Culture. Kantika was inspired by Graver’s grandmother, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul and whose life journey took her to Spain, Cuba, and New York. The novel was also named a best book of the year by National Public Radio, Lilith Magazine, and Libby. The New York Times listed it as one of the 10 Best Historical Fiction novels and 100 Notable Books of 2023. Next month, Graver will receive the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, presented to a writer whose published work of fiction is deemed to have significance to American Jewish history and culture. Read more in BC News.
Accolades for ‘Kantika’
Posted in Awards/Honors, Boston College Authors
Tagged English Department, historical fiction, Jewish history, novel, novelist
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Native kinship, institutionalization, and remembering
On March 21, historian Susan Burch, a professor of American studies at Middlebury College, will give a lecture connected to her most recent book, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). A co-founder of the Disability History Association, Burch’s research and teaching interests focus on the overlaps of deaf, disability, race, Indigeneity, and gender and sexuality in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history. Committed, Burch’s award-winning book, centers on the lived experiences of Indigenous people at the Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric facility in South Dakota and one of many places of imposed removal and confinement of Native Americans. Drawing on oral histories, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Burch tells the story of the people institutionalized and those who experienced the impact of this history. Burch’s lecture is presented by Boston College’s Park Street Corporation Speaker Series and will take place in Gasson 100 beginning at 7 p.m.
Posted in Guest Authors, Park Street Corporation Speaker Series
Tagged Native American, U.S history
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Everyday objects in colonial Ireland
Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2024), written by BC Assistant Professor of English and Irish Studies Colleen Taylor, is the first book to apply new materialist theory to the critical study of Ireland. Irish Materialisms provides original case studies on everyday objects in colonial Ireland (coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and pigs) to examine how each object’s unique materiality contributed to the colonial ideology of British paternalism and afforded creative Irish expression. Through an intimate understanding of the materiality Irish peasants handled on a daily basis, Taylor’s book presents a new portrait of Irish character that reflects greater empowerment, resistance, and expression in the oppressed Irish than has been previously recognized. Taylor specializes in eighteenth-century Irish and British literature and the environmental humanities.
Benedict Arnold
Benedict Arnold was a brilliant battlefield commander who betrayed America in its darkest hour. Becoming Benedict Arnold: A Traitor’s Tale is a new book by Boston College graduate Stephen Yoch that tells how avarice, political intrigue, and love transformed a wounded war hero into America’s most infamous traitor. Becoming Benedict Arnold includes detailed author’s notes providing sources and commentary on events so readers can come to know and understand the real story of Arnold. A lawyer and history buff, Yoch also is the author of Becoming George Washington. Yoch discussed Becoming Benedict Arnold in an interview with his local CBS affiliate.
Prepare to win
Preparation is as powerful as it is simple. Yet, the rather elementary concept is difficult for many people to execute properly. Nick Cidado is an assistant strength & conditioning coach at Boston College and has worked with thousands of athletes over the course of his career. In his new book Sweat More During Peace, Bleed Less During War: Preparation Tactics that Generate Success, Cidado explains the way to think about preparation and shares the tools and techniques needed to prepare for success. He offers practical strategies that illustrate how tiny actions taken far before the moment of fruition ultimately create the expected result. He believes, “You don’t rise to the level of your desired performance, you fall to the degree in which you have prepared.”
Poet Paul Muldoon
Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon will give a poetry reading on March 13 at 5:30 p.m. in Devlin Hall, room 101. An acclaimed poet, Muldoon was born in Portadown, County Armagh, in Northern Ireland, and is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Howdie-Skelp, Frolic and Detour, One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, Hay, Why Brownlee Left, and New Weather. His poetry has been translated into 20 languages. His poetry collection Moy Sand and Gravel won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also published works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, song lyrics, and radio and television drama. He currently holds the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. Among his other awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, and the 2017 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Sponsor: BC Irish Studies Program.
Understanding Cuba
Historian Ada Ferrer will speak on her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Cuba: An American History, at Boston College on March 13 at 7 p.m. in Gasson 100. Spanning more than 500 years, Ferrer’s book chronicles Cuban history and its complex ties to the United States. She explores the sometimes surprising, often troubled intimacy between the two countries, documenting not only the influence of the U.S. on Cuba but also the many ways the island has been a recurring presence in U.S. affairs. Ferrer is also the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, which won the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University as well as multiple prizes from the American Historical Association. Ferrer is the Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. Ferrer’s talk is presented by the Lowell Humanities Series and is co-sponsored by the History Department, Romance Languages and Literatures Department, the Heinz Bluhm Memorial Lecture Series, and the McMullen Museum of Art. Advance registration is requested here for this free lecture.
Posted in Guest Authors, Lowell Humanities Series
Tagged Cuba, history, Pulitzer Prize winner, U.S. history
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Keeping it “real”
BC Associate Professor of Communication Michael Serazio’s new book, The Authenticity Industries: Keeping It ‘Real’ in Media, Culture, and Politics (Standford University Press, 2023), examines the ways in which presentations of “authenticity” have been used by celebrities, politicians, and marketers who recognize the concept’s power to connect with consumers at a time when people are searching for something that feels genuine and true. But, ironically, authenticity’s not actually real: it’s as fabricated as it is ubiquitous. Drawing upon dozens of interviews with campaign consultants, advertising executives, tech company leadership, and entertainment industry gatekeepers, Serazio examines the practices that make people, products, and platforms seem “authentic” in today’s media, culture, and politics. Serazio is also the author of The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture and Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing. Serazio talked about his book and Americans’ craving for authenticity in this interview with Boston College Magazine.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Communication Department, culture, media, politics
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Michael Tubbs
When Michael Tubbs was elected mayor of Stockton (CA) in 2016 he became that city’s first Black mayor and the youngest mayor of any major city in U.S. history. He was 26 years old. Tubbs will present the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics’ Chambers Lecture on February 29 at 6 p.m. in Gasson 100. Tubbs is the author of The Deeper The Roots: A Memoir of Hope and Home (Flatiron Books, 2021), which chronicles his journey from poverty to visionary leader. As mayor from 2017-2021, Tubbs established an intervention program to reduce gun violence and created a scholarship and mentorship program for the city’s students. He currently serves as California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Special Advisor for Economic Mobility. An advocate for addressing issues related to poverty, Tubbs is the founder and chair of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. He also is the founder of EPIC (End Poverty in California). He is the recipient of a New Frontier Award Winner from the JFK Library, and a Civic Leadership Award from The King Center.
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Journalism and the migration crisis
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matthieu Aikins will join Boston College Professor of English Min Hyoung Song on February 27 for a discussion on the experiences of refugees trying to cross heavily fortified borders, the wars in the Middle East, and the dangers of being a journalist covering such stories. The conversation will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Devlin Hall, room 101. Aikins has reported from Afghanistan and the Middle East since 2008. He received the 2022 Pulitzer for international reporting as part of a New York Times team that investigated civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes. In his book The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, Aikins chronicles a dangerous journey on the smuggler’s road to Europe, accompanying his friend, an Afghan refugee. The book has been translated into nine languages. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the anthology The Best American Magazine Writing. Song teaches in the Asian American Studies Program at BC and is the author of three books, including The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American. Sponsor: BC’s Asian American Studies.
Posted in Guest Authors
Tagged Asian American Studies, journalism, migration, Pulitzer Prize winner
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