Award-winning writer Kevin Barry will give a lecture on the influence of place, dialect, and hauntedness in his fiction on April 6 at 7:00 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. Barry is the author of the novels City of Bohane, Beatlebone, and Night Boat to Tangier, and the story collections Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. He is the recipient of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Goldsmiths Prize, Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, Lannan Foundation Literary Award, Rooney Prize, Author’s Club Best First Novel Prize, and the European Union Prize for Literature. Sponsor: Lowell Humanities Series.
Kevin Barry
A journey through bulimia, depression, and anxiety
Boston College alumna Yvonne Castañeda chronicles her journey through anxiety, depression, and an eating disorder in the new book, Pork Belly Tacos with a Side of Anxiety (Santa Monica Press, 2022). In her memoir, Castañeda reflects on her upbringing as the daughter of immigrants, the adverse side effects of bulimia, and the sage advice that turned her life around. According to Castañeda, mental illness is often seen as taboo in the Latinx community, stopping people from seeking help. She hopes her story will resonate with other Latinx people who might be struggling with their own mental health issues. Castañeda earned a M.S.W. from Boston College School of Social Work in 2018 and is now on the BCSSW faculty. Her message is “that change is possible, that grace is possible, that healing is possible.” Read more in this Q&A from BCSSW.
Posted in Alumni Authors, Boston College Authors
Tagged Latinx, memoir, mental health, School of Social Work
Leave a comment
Play ball
Atlanta was the first southern city with professional teams in the four major sports of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. The pursuit, arrival, and response to professional sports in Georgia’s capital city is the focus of Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), a new book by Boston College alumnus Clayton Trutor. According to the publisher: “The excitement surrounding the arrival of four professional franchises in Atlanta in a six-year period soon gave way to widespread frustration and, eventually, widespread apathy toward its home teams. All four of Atlanta’s franchises struggled in the standings and struggled to draw fans to their games.” Loserville also scrutinizes the origins of the primary model for acquiring professional sports franchises: offers of municipal financing for new stadiums. Other Sunbelt cities like San Diego, Phoenix, and Tampa adopted Atlanta’s approach, with mixed results—both in terms of on-field success and financial stability. Trutor earned a Ph.D. in history from Boston College. He writes about college football and basketball for SB Nation and is an instructor at Norwich University in Vermont.
Cybersecurity risk management
Woods College of Advancing Studies adjunct faculty member Brian Haugli is co-author, with Cynthia Brumfield, of the new book, Cybersecurity Risk Management: Mastering the Fundamentals Using the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (Wiley, 2021). Brumfield, a veteran technology analyst, and Haugli, a cybersecurity expert, deliver a straightforward and up-to-date exploration of the fundamentals of cybersecurity risk planning and management. Cybersecurity Risk Management offers readers easy-to-understand overviews of cybersecurity risk management principles and network infrastructure planning, as well as the tools and techniques for detecting cyberattacks. The book also provides a roadmap to the development of a continuity of operations plan in the event of a cyberattack. Haugli is the managing partner for SideChannel and CEO of RealCISO.io. He teaches in the Woods College’s M.S. in Cybersecurity Policy & Governance Program.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged cybersecurity, Woods College of Advancing Studies
Leave a comment
Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies and founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton University, investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. On March 24 at 7 p.m., Benjamin will give a webinar lecture on her award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. According to the publisher, Race After Technology “cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce white supremacy and …shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity.” Her lecture is presented by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series and co-sponsored by the Lowell Humanities Series and the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society. Visit the Humanities Series website to register.
Claudia Rankine @ BC
During a two-day residency at Boston College, award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, one of America’s premier thinkers on race and interiority, met with students and faculty and shared an intimate look at the experience of racism. She read from her book, Citizen: An American Lyric, and took part in a Q&A via the Lowell Humanities Series. The next day, Rankine participated in an Artist-Meets-Critic discussion on media, racism, and belonging in America. Read more on BC News.
Posted in Guest Authors, Lowell Humanities Series
Tagged African and African Diaspora Studies, poetry, racism
Leave a comment
Roots of Central American migration
Salem State University Professor of History Avi Chomsky will present from her recent book, Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration (Beacon Press, 2021), at a Boston College event on March 17 at 12 noon in McElroy Commons, room 237. In Central America’s Forgotten History, Chomsky traces the roots of displacement and migration in Central America from the Spanish conquest to the present day, concluding that the more immediate roots of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras lie in the wars and in the U.S. interventions of the 1980s and the peace accords of the 1990s. This will be a hybrid event with in-person and online options. Sponsor: Boston College’s Center for Human Rights and International Justice. RSVP for in-person or online (Zoom) option at tinyurl.com/chomsky0317.
Posted in Guest Authors
Tagged Central America, colonialism, foreign policy, history, migration
Leave a comment
Dead duck
Boston College graduate Colleen Shogan is back with another murder mystery for congressional staffer Kit Marshall to solve. In her latest novel, Dead as a Duck (Camel Press, 2021), the mayor of Duck, North Carolina, an upscale beach town in the Outer Banks, is found dead and Kit’s brother is a suspect. Kit Marshall is the protagonist of Shogan’s award-winning cozy mysteries series, which includes Stabbing in the Senate, Homicide in the House, and Larceny at the Library, among other titles. A former legislative staffer and executive at the Library of Congress, Shogan is the senior vice president of the White House Historical Association. Shogan earned a bachelor’s degree from BC in 1997.
Unidentified flying objects
On June 24, 1947, a private pilot reported numerous dazzling objects rushing through the sky above Mount Rainier in Washington state. Within a few weeks, hundreds of sightings of flying saucers were reported to news media, followed by reports of a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico. Boston College graduate Gordon Arnold cuts through decades of mystique and confusion and offers an account of what is known and unknown about the happenings in the skies over mid-century America. Flying Saucers Over America: The UFO Craze of 1947 (McFarland & Company Publishers, 2021) is based on many sources, including previously classified government records. As Arnold writes in the book’s introduction, whether you are a believer or skeptic, UFOs are “innately interesting as a historical and cultural phenomenon.” An educator, Arnold earned a doctorate in 1994 from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development.
Harnessing disruption
Forward-thinking leaders must ready their organizations to respond to disruptions— such as the COVID-19 pandemic—if they hope to be successful, according to Carroll School Information Systems Professor Gerald C. Kane, co-author of The Transformation Myth: Leading Your Organization through Uncertain Times (MIT Press, 2021). Kane and co-authors Rich Nanda, Anh Nguyen Phillips, and Jonathan R. Copulsky have written a guide for surviving future disruptions—which are inevitable—and parlaying the lessons learned into greater growth. The authors identify and describe the traits that characterize successful organizations and the characteristics of their leaders, with examples from real-world organizations. According to Kane and his co-authors, the companies that emerge stronger because of disruption are those that used it as an opportunity for innovation. Read more from Carroll School News.
BC Bookmarks 