College students and their parents often question the “return on investment” from humanities courses, but Boston College Professor of English Carlo Rotella says that misses the point of what’s going on in the classroom. He contends that teaching—particularly an English-lit course—is not about a clean transfer of knowledge. His new book, What Can I Get Out of This? Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics (University of California Press, 2025), offers an eloquent and moving story about the value and the pleasures of intellectual exploration, and why it matters beyond the classroom. What Can I Get Out of This? provides an intimate look at teaching and learning from the perspective of Rotella and the 33 BC students in his course. He demonstrates how the students’ reluctance—”How does this get me a job?”—transforms into insight as they wrestle with challenging books, share ideas, discover how to think critically, and form a community. They learn how to extract meaning from the world around them, revealing the truth of what students actually experience in college. Learn more: WBZ Radio | WWOD New Hampshire | WGTD Wisconsin | Q&A with Deborah Kalb. A regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Rotella has written books about cities, boxing, music, and literature, including The World Is Always Coming to an End, Cut Time, and Playing in Time.
Higher education’s value
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Tagged English Department, higher education, liberal arts
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Historian Jill Lepore
The Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy will host historian and author Jill Lepore on December 3. She will deliver a lecture in the Burns Library at 5 p.m. based on her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. In We the People, Lepore discusses successful and unsuccessful amendments to the constitution and argues that the Framers did not intend for the Constitution to remain stagnant, “like a butterfly under glass,” but rather that it should be continuously amended and modified. Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. She is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States, among other books
The Camino Ignaciano
An updated edition of the Official Guide to the Camino Ignaciano has been released by Jesuit Sources, part of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College. Written by José Luis Iriberri, S.J., and Chris Lowney, the Official Guide to the Camino Ignaciano offers pilgrims of today both practical information and spiritual guidance on how to retrace the journey Saint Ignatius made in 1522 from Loyola to Montserrat, Manresa, and beyond. The guide includes comprehensive advice on when to go, where to stay, what routes to follow, and what landmarks to visit along the way, as well as reflections that will help pilgrims to pray through the Spiritual Exercises. Official Guide to the Camino Ignaciano will help readers in discovering personal transformation just as Ignatius did—through perseverance, faith, and deep reflection.
A collection of essays by Chris Bruell
Boston College alumni Eric Buzzetti and Devin Stauffer, who both earned doctorates in political science from BC in 1998, have edited a landmark collection of writings by Christopher Bruell, a highly regarded Boston College professor of political science who died in 2024. A student of the renowned political philosopher Leo Strauss, Bruell was considered one of the great modern interpreters of classical and modern political philosophy. Christopher Bruell: Essays of Five Decades on Philosophy and Philosophers (SUNY Press, 2025) includes almost all the essays, lectures, and book chapters that Bruell published during his scholarly career. The volume also includes three previously unpublished essays. The essays take up a wide range of topics, including Strauss, liberal education, the problem of relativism, the American Founding, the nature of citizenship, and the question of happiness. Above all, the collection focuses on the recovery of classical political philosophy and includes pathbreaking essays on Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle. Buzzetti is on the faculty of Concordia University in Montréal. Stauffer is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
‘Nabokov on the Heights’
Nabokov on the Heights: New Studies from Boston College (Academic Studies Press, 2025), edited by Boston College Professor Maxim D. Shrayer, features essays by BC undergraduate and graduate students who took Shrayer’s seminar on the Russian American writer Vladimir Nabokov. The volume also features contributions from Shrayer and his English Department colleagues Professors Kevin Ohi and Eric Weiskott. The essays cover a broad thematic and intellectual terrain and showcase cutting-edge Nabokov scholarship and criticism. The topics include translingualism, sexuality, Cold War politics, food studies, Nabokov and the visual arts, religion and metaphysics, urban studies, immigration studies, and modernist poetics. The student/alumni contributors are: Nicholas Adler, Megumi DeMond, Jared Hackworth, Nina Khaghany, Matthew Lyberg, Brendan McCourt, Katie Pelkey, Samuel L. Peterson, Ciara Spencer, and Fiona Steacy. More from BC News.
Drama and romance in a small town
In a new literary romance novel by Liz O’Neill, expectations set for 19-year-old Sabina McTigue’s future are challenged when the young socialite meets the charming Colin Hatch, a charter pilot with a cloudy history. Set in 1950s coastal New England, Ways of Virtue (She Writes Press/Simon & Schuster, 2025) has been described as Dirty Dancing meets Jane Austen. Kirkus Review called Ways of Virtue “delightful” and “a compelling story of love, dashed expectations, and second chances.” O’Neill is an associate director in the Center for Corporate Citizenship, housed at BC’s Carroll School of Management. She holds a M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged coming-of-age, Massachusetts, New England, romance
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The role of migrant shelters in Mexico
Aside from being one of the most important migration corridors in the world, Mexico is becoming an immigrant destination itself, with more and more migrants deciding or needing to stay in the country after failing to enter the United States. Migrant shelters have emerged as an integral part of Mexico’s humanitarian ecosystem, according to BC School of Social Work Assistant Professor Alejandro Olayo-Méndez, S.J. In his new book, Humanitarianism from Below: Faith, Welfare, and the Role of Casas de Migrantes in Mexico (NYU Press, 2025), he offers a detailed look at the experiences and challenges of these migrant shelters. For his research, Fr. Olayo-Méndez traveled along migrant routes several times in order to gain knowledge about how migrants move and how they interact with the migrant shelters. According to Fr. Olayo-Méndez, migrant shelters have emerged as an informal welfare system providing temporary living quarters, organizing food preparation and water distribution, and offering childcare, legal assistance, and money transfer services, among other services. Read more in BC News.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Jesuit author, Mexico, migration, School of Social Work
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Eric Klinenberg
Bestselling author and public sociologist Eric Klinenberg, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, will present the Jane Jacobs Lecture at Boston College on November 5 at 6 p.m. in 245 Beacon St. (Room 107). Klinenberg is author of the acclaimed book, Palaces for the People, in which he contends that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, churches, and parks where crucial connections are formed. His latest book, 2020, is a meticulously reported, character-driven investigation of a time when nothing was certain and everything was at stake. Klinenberg’s lecture, “Democracy, Equity, Resilience: Holding Communities Together,” is presented by the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics and co-sponsored by the Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action.
Novelist Emily St. John Mandel
Boston College’s Park Street Corporation Speaker Series, which seeks to engage students in exploring values and ethics related to health and healthcare practices, will host bestselling author Emily St. John Mandel on November 4 at 7 p.m. in the Heights Room. Mandel is the author of several novels, including The Glass Hotel, Sea of Tranquility, and Station Eleven, a story of a troupe of actors and musicians bringing arts and humanity to settlements after a flu pandemic has killed most of the world’s population. Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Toronto Book Award, and was adapted into a limited series for HBO. (Author photo by JiaHao Peng.)
Strauss and Lessing
Assistant Professor of Political Science Hannes Kerber is editor of Leo Strauss, La dottrina essoterica: Saggi su Lessing, published by Edizioni ETS. The volume (translated to The Exoteric Doctorine: Essays on Lessing) is a collection of posthumous writings that shed new light on Leo Strauss’s thought by exploring the decisive moment when the German philosopher, who emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s, rediscovered exoteric writing and made it the cornerstone of his philosophical method. From the publisher: “At the heart of the volume is the figure of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, an Enlightenment thinker who proves to be a constant and subterranean presence in Strauss’s thought, despite his name rarely appearing in the works published during Strauss’s lifetime.” In a concluding essay, Kerber explores the hermeneutic experience of exotericism in Strauss, Lessing, and Schleiermacher, focusing on the practice of philosophically reading Plato’s dialogues. Kerber’s expertise is in 17th and 18th century political thought. He is author of the prize-winning book, Die Aufklärung der Aufklärung: Lessing und die Herausforderung des Christentums.
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