Beatrix Hoffman, a historian of the U.S. health care system, will present “Immigration and the Right to Healthcare” on Nov. 8 at 7 p.m. in Gasson 100. She is the author of the books, The Wages of Sickness: The Politics of Health Insurance in Progressive America and Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930, and co-editor of Patients as Policy Actors. She has published articles on topics such as social movements in the U.S. health system, the origins of insurance co-payments and deductibles, and the rise of the emergency room as safety net. Hoffman is a faculty member at Northern Illinois University and her work has been supported by awards from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies. Sponsor: Park Street Corporation Speaker Series.
Immigration and the right to healthcare
Posted in Guest Authors, Park Street Corporation Speaker Series
Tagged health care, immigrants
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Latino City honored
Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945–2000 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), written by Boston College alumna Llana Barber, is the recipient of the Kenneth Jackson Award from the Urban History Association. The award honors the best book in North American urban history. Latino City explores the transformation of Lawrence into New England’s first Latino-majority city. Like many industrial cities, Lawrence entered a downward economic spiral in the decades after World War II. The arrival of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the late 20th century brought new life to the struggling city, but the newly arrived faced hostility from their neighbors, exclusion from local governance, inadequate city services, and limited job prospects. Barber received her Ph.D. in history from Boston College and is on the faculty of State University of New York College at Old Westbury. Her book is also co-winner of the 2018 Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association.
Posted in Alumni Authors, Awards/Honors
Tagged History Department, Latino/a, Massachusetts, urban life
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Burns Scholar Lecture
Ciaran O’Neill (Gary Wayne Gilbert)
Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies Ciaran O’Neill will present a public lecture on “Love, Power, and Consent in pre-famine Ireland: a Dublin Courtship” on Nov. 6 at 4:30 p.m. in Burns Library. O’Neill has been conducting a study, with Juliana Adelman of Dublin City University, on an unpublished diary kept by law student James Christopher Fitzgerald Kenney, who had a love affair with Mary Louisa McMahon. O’Neill will discuss what their relationship reveals about love, social class, courtship, and moral conduct in 1840s Dublin. O’Neill is the Ussher Assistant Professor in Nineteenth-Century History at Trinity College Dublin and president of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland. He is editor of Irish Elites in the Nineteenth Century and author of Catholics of Consequence: Transnational Education, Social Mobility and the Irish Catholic Elite, 1850-1900, winner of the James S. Donnelly Prize for History and the Social Sciences. More from BC News.
Posted in Guest Authors
Tagged Burns Library, Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies, Ireland, Irish history
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Lebanon’s Jewish community
In his new book, Lebanon’s Jewish Community: Fragments of Lives Arrested (Palgrave MacMillan), BC Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies Franck Salameh presents both history and memory of Lebanon’s Jews, considering what, how, and why they choose to remember their Lebanese lives. The work gives voice to personal testimonies, family archives, private papers, recollections of expatriate and resident Lebanese Jewish communities, as well as rarely tapped archival sources. Salameh is the chair of BC’s Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures and senior editor in chief of The Levantine Review. He is the author of Language Memory and Identity in the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon and Charles Corm: An Intellectual Biography of a Twentieth-Century Lebanese “Young Phoenician,” among other works. He also recently published an essay on Belgian-Lebanese Jesuit scholar Henri Lammens in The Journal of the Middle East and Africa.
Reparations for historic institutional violence
Ruth Rubio Marín, a professor of constitutional law at University of Sevilla (Spain), director of the Gender and Governance Programme at the School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute (Italy), and a faculty member at New York University’s Hauser Global Law School Program, will present “Reparations for Historic Institutional Violence: Learning from Transitional Justice?” on Nov. 1 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. Her research represents an attempt to understand how public law creates categories of inclusion and exclusion around different axis including gender, citizenship, nationality, and ethnicity. She is the author or editor/co-editor of several books, including Immigration as a Democratic Challenge: Citizenship and Inclusion in Germany and the United States and What Happened to the Women?: Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations. Her current book project is The Disestablishment of Gender in the New Millennium Constitutionalism. She has extensive experience dealing with reparations in post-conflict societies, including in Morocco, Nepal, and Colombia. Her Lowell Humanities Series lecture is part of a conference on “Transitional Justice, Truth-telling, and the Legacy of Irish Institutional Abuse” supported by the Institute for the Liberal Arts, Office of the Provost, Irish Studies Program, the Jesuit Institute, Boston College Law School, and the Center for Human Rights and International Justice.
The Sociable City
Boston College alumnus Jamin Creed Rowan will discuss his book, The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), on Oct. 30 in Devlin Hall, room 100 at 4:30 p.m. In his book, Rowan investigates the history of how American society has conceived of urban relationships and considers how these ideas have shaped the cities in which we live. Rowan used source materials often overlooked by scholars of urban life—including memoirs, plays, novels, literary journalism, and museum exhibits. He received a Ph.D. in English from Boston College, and teaches in the English Department and the American Studies Program at Brigham Young University. Sponsor: Boston College Libraries in conjunction with the Institute for the Liberal Arts and the American Studies Program.
A guide to Paris
Jayne Boisvert, who received a master’s degree in French from Boston College, has published a guidebook to Paris that includes travel tips as well as biographies and addresses associated with famous Americans, from the 18th century to present day, who lived in the City of Light. Pilgrimage to Paris: The Cheapo Snob’s Guide to the City and Americans Who Lived There (Open Books, 2018) highlights attractions, things to do in Paris, shops, museums, churches and eateries. Boisvert is a retired professor of French and comparative literature who has lived in Paris.
A Love Story in Eighteen Songs
Peter Coviello will read from his memoir Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs (Penguin Books, 2018) on Oct. 25 at 5 p.m. in Connolly House, 300 Hammond St. Coviello, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature and Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America, a finalist for Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies and an honorable mention for the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize. Sponsor: Institute for the Liberal Arts.
Corporations are People Too
Should corporations be able to claim rights of free speech, religious conscience, and due process? BC Law School Professor Kent Greenfield, an expert in constitutional law, takes on this very question in his new book, Corporations Are People Too (And They Should Act Like It) (Yale University Press, 2018). Greenfield explores corporations’ claims to constitutional rights and the foundational conflicts about their obligations in society. He argues that a blanket opposition to corporate personhood is misguided, since it is consistent with both the purpose of corporations and the Constitution itself that corporations can claim rights at least some of the time. The solution is not to end corporate personhood but to require corporations to act more like citizens. Greenfield served as a clerk to Justice David Souter of the United States Supreme Court. A frequent media commentator, Greenfield is also the author of the book The Myth of Choice and numerous articles in leading legal journals, including the Yale Law Journal and the Virginia Law Review.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Boston College Law School, constitution, legal issues
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West Wingers
Boston College alumna Stephanie Valencia is a contributor to the new book, West Wingers: Stories from the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House (Penguin Books, 2018). Eighteen staffers share their personal accounts of how they made it to the White House and what they did there. Each story showcases the human face of government and offers a behind-the-scenes take on the Obama presidency. Valencia worked for Barack Obama for nearly a decade, starting as deputy Latino vote director on the 2008 campaign, and then serving on the Obama-Biden transition team before joining the White House at the start of the first term. Valencia ended her time at the White House as special assistant to the President and principal deputy director in the Office of Public Engagement. Valencia is a past recipient of BC’s Romero Scholarship and has been named to Huffington Post’s list of 40 Under 40: Latinos in American Politics.
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