Boston College alumnus Mark Doyle, an associate professor at Middle Tennessee State University, will present the fall Dalsimer Lecture: “Black and Brown Amidst the Orange and Green: Toward a Multiracial History of Ireland” on Sept. 27 at 5 p.m. Doyle’s lecture will explore the deep history of Asian and African immigrants and visitors to Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries. He argues for a new history of Ireland that not only incorporates the experiences of nonwhite people but also uses those experiences to understand Irish attitudes toward race, immigration, and empire in the modern era. Doyle is the author of Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Pax and Fighting like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics, and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast, and editor of The British Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia. The lecture will be followed by the launch of the book Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel (Syracuse University Press), by BC alumna Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of modern Irish literature at Le Moyne College, and vice president of the American Conference for Irish Studies. In Trauma and Recovery, Costello-Sullivan uses the work of Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Anne Enright, Emma Donohue, Colum McCann, and Sebastian Barry to highligh the power of narrative to amend and address memory and trauma and the possibility of recovery. Her previous publications include Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín. Events take place in Devlin Hall, room 101. Sponsor: Center for Irish Programs.
Dalsimer Lecture & Book Launch
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged book launch, Ireland, Irish history, Irish literature
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin will present “Where Do We Go From Here: Leadership in Turbulent Times” on September 27 at 4:00 p.m. in the Heights Room of Corcoran Commons. Leadership in Turbulent Times (Simon & Schuster, 2018), Goodwin’s most recent book, is a seminal work based on her five decades of studying the presidential leadership of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Goodwin is also the author of several acclaimed books, including The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys; No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, winner of the Carnegie Medal. Her book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, was the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated film “Lincoln.” A graduate of Colby College and Harvard University, Goodwin has been honored with the Charles Frankel Prize, Sarah Josepha Hale Medal, New England Book Award, Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and Ohioana Book Award. Sponsor: The Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics’ Clough Colloquium.
Book event for Poverty: Responding Like Jesus
Professor of Theology Ken Himes, O.F.M. and BC alumnus Conor Kelly, an assistant professor at Marquette University, will talk about poverty and Christian discipleship at an event celebrating their new book Poverty: Responding Like Jesus (Paraclete Press in cooperation with the Church in the 21st Century Center, 2018). The conversation luncheon will be held in Gasson Hall, room 100 on Sept. 25 beginning at noon. (RSVP to church21@bc.edu). Books will be available for purchase. Edited by Fr. Himes and Kelly, Poverty: Responding Like Jesus focuses on the biblical and theological roots of the Church’s commitment to care for the poor. The volume features a chapter written by BC’s Joseph Professor of Catholic Spirituality Pheme Perkins. Sponsor: Church in the 21st Century Center.
Blacks and Irish in 19th-century Boston
Boston College alumnus Millington Bergeson-Lockwood, a historian of race, politics, and the law in U.S., will present “Politics, Power, and the Past: Black and Irish Political Alliances in 1880s Boston” on Sept. 26 at 4:30 p.m. in Burns Library. Bergeson-Lockwood is the author of the new book Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston, which examines how Black and Irish Bostonians forged a powerful political coalition in the 1880s that was centered on growing urban political power, a mutual struggle against oppression, and a shared place in the story of American independence. In his book, Bergeson-Lockwood offers a new narrative of the Reconstruction era centered in the urban North, and shows how in their activism Black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America’s democracy. Sponsor: Office of the Provost with BC Libraries and the Center for Irish Programs.
Posted in Alumni Authors, BC Libraries
Tagged African American history, Boston, history, politics
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Book launch: Cambridge History of Ireland
Boston College will host a launch of The Cambridge History of Ireland on Sept. 20 at Burns Library. Written by a team of more than 100 leading historians from around the world, The Cambridge History of Ireland is the most comprehensive and authoritative history of Ireland to date. Four volumes bring together the latest scholarship, setting Irish history from 600 to the present within broader Atlantic, European, imperial and global contexts. Boston College contributors to the volumes are historians Kevin Kenny and Robert Savage. A reception will be held from 6 to 7 p.m. Following the reception, Liz O’Donnell, former Irish Minister of State in the Department of Foreign Affairs, will offer remarks on the Northern Ireland peace process, the advancement of women in Ireland, and contemporary political issues, including diversity and inclusion. The event will conclude with a panel discussion and audience Q&A with O’Donnell and the four volume editors: Thomas Bartlett (a former Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies), James Kelly, Jane Ohlmeyer, and Brendan Smith. Sponsors: Boston College Libraries, the Global Leadership Institute, and Cambridge University Press, in collaboration with the Center for Irish Programs and Consul General of Ireland in Boston.
Posted in BC Libraries, Guest Authors
Tagged book launch, Burns Library, Irish history
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GroundTruth Project
Award-winning journalist Charles Sennott will present “GroundTruth in the ‘Post-Truth’ Era” on Sept. 19 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. A former Middle East Bureau Chief and Europe Bureau Chief for the Boston Globe, Sennott has reported on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in at least 15 countries, including the 2011 revolution in Cairo and the Arab Spring. Sennott is the founder and executive director of The GroundTruth Project, dedicated to training the next generation of international journalists for the digital age. Sennott is also the co-founder of GlobalPost, an acclaimed international news website. Sponsor: Lowell Humanities Series
How Art Works
In her new book How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2018), Boston College Professor of Psychology Ellen Winner takes on a number of questions about the arts, such as “What makes something art?” and ‘Why do we seek out and even cherish sorrow and fear from art when we go out of our way to avoid these very emotions in real life?” Also, ‘How do we decide what is good art? Do aesthetic judgments have any objective truth value?” In a piece for the New Yorker, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom calls Winner’s new book “exhilarating” because she draws on research in psychology, including studies from her own lab, to provide some answers to these questions. Winner directs the Arts and Mind Lab, which focuses on cognition in the arts in typical and gifted children as well as adults. She is the author of more than 100 articles and three other books–Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts, The Point of Words: Children’s Understanding of Metaphor and Irony, and Gifted Children: Myths and Realities.
David Hopkins
Boston College Associate Professor of Political Science David Hopkins and co-author Matt Grossmann have been honored with the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the American Political Science Association for Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. The award recognizes a book published in the last two years that made an outstanding contribution to research and scholarship on political organizations and parties. Hopkins’ newest book is Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which examines the partisan divide in American politics. Hopkins places the current partisan and electoral era in historical context, explains how the increased salience of social issues since the 1980s has redefined the parties’ geographic bases of support, and reveals the critical role that American political institutions play in intermediating between the behavior of citizens and the outcome of public policy-making. The widening geographic gap in voters’ partisan preferences, as magnified further by winner-take-all electoral rules, has rendered most of the nation safe territory for either Democratic or Republican candidates in both presidential and congressional elections – with significant consequences for party competition, candidate strategy, and the operation of government.
Posted in Awards/Honors, Boston College Authors
Tagged Political Science department, politics
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New from Suzanne Matson
In her new novel, Ultraviolet (Catapult, 2018), BC Professor of English Suzanne Matson tells the story of three generations of women, shining a light on the complexities of marriage, motherhood, aging, and the end of life. Spanning 80 years and two countries, Ultraviolet reveals the drama that is within every existence and the strengths and fragilities of people’s relationships with others. Matson will read from Ultraviolet at a Dean’s Colloquium on Sept. 13 at 4:30 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. Matson is a poet and author of the novels The Hunger Moon, A Trick of Nature, and The Tree-Sitter. Read a piece drawn and adapted from Ultraviolet in the most recent issue of Boston College Magazine. | More from BC News.
Ireland’s Global Revolution?
To what extent should the Irish revolution of 1919-23 be understood as part of a global—as well as national—story? Fearghal McGarry, a professor at Queen’s University Belfast, will give a talk on Sept. 12 that examines how the Easter Rising has come to be remembered in more pluralistic terms during the “Decade of Centenaries” and explores the implications of this commemorative shift in terms of understanding Ireland’s post-war experiences. An expert in 20th century Irish history, McGarry is the author of the books, The Rising: Ireland: Easter 1916; The Abbey Rebels of 1916, and Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero, as well as many book chapters and articles. The lecture, which begins at 4:15 p.m., will held in Devlin Hall, room 101. Sponsor: Center for Irish Programs.
BC Bookmarks 