Boston College graduate Lynne Viti, who is the poet laureate for Westwood, Massachusetts, was honored last month with the Westbeth Artists Housing’s 2023 Miriam Chaikin Writing Award in Poetry. She also was awarded Third Prize for her poem “Westwood Lodge, the Summer Hotel” in the 2023 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards presented by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. In addition, her fourth microchapbook with Origami Poems project, Waxing Gibbous Moon, was recently released. Viti is the author of the poetry collections The Walk to Cefalù and Dancing at Lake Montebello; the chapbooks Baltimore Girls and The Glamorganshire Bible; and the short fiction collection Going Too Fast.
Honors and a new publication for Lynne Viti
Best by or on Fénelon
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715) was a major intellectual figure known for his writings on spiritual life, political philosophy, and education. Boston College Professor of Political Science Ryan Patrick Hanley, a specialist on the political philosophy of the Enlightenment period, picks five of the best books by or on Fénelon for the media site, Five Books for Catholics. According to Hanley, “Fénelon deserves our attention for his vision of political life. He had a remarkably humane understanding of what politics could be and how it could be reformed. That part of his vision remains important today, especially in our fraught global political moment.” Hanley is the author of The Political Philosophy of Fénelon, and a companion translation volume, Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings.
Historical novel inspired by alumna’s family
Boston College graduate Elizabeth (Betsy) Millane has penned a novel based in part on her family’s experiences in occupied Holland during the World War II. Sixty Blades of Grass (Bloodhound Books, 2023) tells the story of Rika, a 17-year-old Dutch Resistance fighter. She paints in fields overlooking the busy rail yards, but hidden in her artwork is information crucial to the Dutch Underground. But Rika’s covert activities aren’t the only thing on her mind. She suspects her German-born father of collaborating with the Germans and is determined to uncover the truth. Sixty Blades of Grass has been called “a riveting, heartrending novel of danger and betrayal that explores what it takes to lay down one’s life for another in the most harrowing of circumstances.” Millane graduated from BC in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in English. It was during her junior year abroad that she visited her Dutch relatives several times and learned of their of heroism and sacrifice, which formed the basis for Sixty Blades of Grass.
Building a better workplace
Rethinking Work: Essays on Building a Better Workplace (Routledge, 2023), co-edited by Boston College Lynch School of Education and Human Development Professor David Blustein and Lisa Y. Flores (University of Missouri), is a collection of essays by thought-leaders, scholars, activists, psychologists, and social scientists who imagine new workplace structures and policies that promote decent and fair work for all members of society, especially those who are most vulnerable. Rethinking Work offers critical analyses in conjunction with constructive solutions on rebuilding work, providing direction and context for ongoing debates and policy discussions about work. Contributors include Lynch School faculty members Belle Liang and Betty S. Lai and doctoral student Brenna Lincoln.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Lynch School of Education and Human Development, work, workplace
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Realism and uncertainty in world politics
In his book An Unwritten Future: Realism and Uncertainty in World Politics (Princeton University Press, 2022), Boston College Professor of Political Science and International Studies Jonathan Kirshner offers a fresh reassessment of classical realism and reveals how this enduring approach—and not its would-be successors, such as structural realism—provides the best understanding of crucial events in the international political arena. Kirshner illustrates how a classical realist approach gives new insights into major upheavals of the 20th century as as well as into the vital questions of the present—such as the implications of China’s rise, the ways that social and economic change alter the balance of power and the nature of international conflict, and the consequences of the end of the U.S.-led postwar order for the future of world politics. An Unwritten Future received the 2023 Jervis-Schroeder Best Book Award Honorable Mention from the International History & Politics Section of American Political Science Association. Kirshner discussed his book in this Q&A from his publisher. Kirshner has also penned a book review of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Martin Wolf for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Kirshner is the author of numerous other books, including American Power After the Financial Crisis, Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America, and the novel Urban Flight.
Fathers and sons
Mere weeks after Luke Russert, the only child of journalists Maureen Orth of Vanity Fair and Tim Russert of NBC News, graduated from Boston College in 2008, Tim Russert died unexpectedly. In a new memoir, Look for Me There: Grieving My Father, Finding Myself (Harper Horizon, 2023), Luke Russert writes about his exploration to find himself and his place in the world in the face of crushing expectations and grief. After his father’s death, Russert worked at NBC News, covering politics. But, he realized he had no good answer as to why he was chasing his father’s legacy. He left the network to set out on his own path. What began as several open-ended months of travel to decompress and reassess morphed into a three-plus-year odyssey across six continents to discover the world and, ultimately, to find himself. Look for Me There is both the vivid narrative of that journey and the emotional story of a young man taking charge of his life, reexamining his relationship with his parents, and finally grieving his larger-than-life father. Learn more in these interviews with Russert: People | TODAY Show | CBS | MSNBC | NBC Meet the Press
In the face of the abuse crisis
Doing Theology and Theological Ethics in the Face of the Abuse Crisis (Pickwick Publications, 2023) is a timely volume of essays by scholars from around the world who offer insights on the crisis itself and pathways for moving forward. Edited by Boston College Canisius Professor and Vice Provost James F. Keenan, S.J.; Hans Zollner, S.J., (Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome); and Daniel Fleming (St Vincent’s Health, Australia and School of Medicine, University of Note Dame Australia), Doing Theology and Theological Ethics in the Face of the Abuse Crisi is the fruit of a “theological laboratory” initiated by the then-Centre for Child Protection and the Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC). Eventually those from the laboratory engaged those meeting for two years via “virtual tables,” (due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Scholars were asked to ponder the following questions: To what extent have we been blind to these issues? Why have our efforts in theology and theological ethics been so slow to wrestle with this crisis? How are theology and theological ethics implicated in the crisis? And how might the disciplines be constructive in responding? Richard Lennan of the BC School of Theology and Ministry is one of volume’s contributors. The book is part of the Global Theological Ethics book series, a joint venture of the Journal of Moral Theology and CTEWC that focuses on works that feature authors from around the world, draw on resources from the traditions of Catholic theological ethics, and attend to concrete issues facing the world today.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Catholic Church, theological ethics, Theology Department
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The rise and influence of teachers unions
Despite being all but nonexistent until the 1960s, teachers unions are maintaining members, assets—and political influence while other American labor organizations struggle for survival and relevance in the 21st century. In the new book, How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Boston College Associate Professor of Political Science Michael Hartney details how state and local governments adopted a new system of labor relations that subsidized—and in turn, strengthened—the power of teachers unions as interest groups in American politics. In doing so, governments created a force in American politics: an entrenched, subsidized machine for membership recruitment, political fundraising, and electoral mobilization efforts that have informed elections and policymaking ever since. Backed by original quantitative research from across the American educational landscape, Hartney shows how American education policymaking and labor relations have combined to create some of the very voter blocs to which it currently answers.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged American politics, Political Science department, teachers, unions
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The descendant
Fourteen-year-old Taína just learned that she is a descendant of a long line of strong Taíno women, but will knowing this help her bring peace and justice to her family and community? This question is at the heart of a new young adult novel written by Elizabeth Santiago, a faculty member in Boston College’s Woods College of Advancing Studies. Taína Perez, The Moonlit Vine’s protagonist, has a lot to juggle. There’s constant trouble at school and in her neighborhood, her older brother was kicked out of the house, and with her mom at work, she’s left alone to care for her little brother and aging grandmother. But life takes a turn when her abuela tells her she is a direct descendant of Anacaona, the beloved Taíno leader, warrior, and poet, who was murdered by the Spanish in 1503. Abuela also gives Taína an amulet and a zemi and says that it’s time for her to step into her power like the women who came before her. Kirkus Review calls The Moonlit Vine (Lee & Low Books, 2023) “Deeply moving, beautifully written, and inspiring.”
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged history, identity, Woods College of Advancing Studies, young adult novel
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Women in revolutionary America
Women’s rights and agency during the era of the American Revolution were restricted by laws and social custom. Yet, according to In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America (New York University Press, 2023)—a new book from Boston College graduate Jacqueline Beatty—women exploited these confines, transforming constraints into vehicles of empowerment. From the publisher: Through a close reading of thousands of legislative, judicial, and institutional pleas across 70 years of history in three urban centers, Beatty illustrates the ways in which women asserted their status as dependents, demanding the protections owed to them as the assumed subordinates of men. In so doing, they claimed various forms of aid and assistance, won divorce suits, and defended themselves and their female friends in the face of patriarchal assumptions about their powerlessness. Ultimately, women in the revolutionary era were able to advocate for themselves and express a relative degree of power not in spite of their dependent status, but because of it. Unsurprisingly, says Beatty, the success of these methods was contingent on women’s race, class, and socioeconomic status, and the degree to which their language and behavior conformed to assumptions of Anglo-American femininity. Beatty, who earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Boston College in 2010, is an assistant professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania.
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged American history, American Revolution, History Department, legal, women
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