Spring 2026 Symposium

Daron Acemoglu

Daron won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics for his groundbreaking work on the key role strong institutions play in a country’s democracy and wellbeing, encapsulated in his international bestseller Why Nations Fail (co-authored with his frequent collaborator, The University of Chicago’s James Robinson). Drawing on fascinating real-world stories like the town on the U.S./Mexico border that has a dramatic difference in prosperity on either side of the border, Daron reveals how we can leverage our institutions to improve our communities and our world. In a moment where our democracy stands at a crossroads, his work has never been more vital.

One of the most renowned economists on the planet, Daron is a historian who looks at what has happened and tells you what will happen next, with deep expertise in the impacts of technology on democracy, culture, and civilization. In his most recent book Power and Progress, co-authored with fellow Nobel Prize winner Simon Johnson, he shows us how technology has historically been used to benefit a select few, but we can regain control and turn today’s advances into empowering and democratizing tools. In talks, he gives us the big-picture vision we need to change the way we innovate in order to use our creativity for the good of humanity. The Financial Times named Power and Progress to their Best
Technology Books of 2023, recognizing that Daron’s insights into power, institutions, and social progress are vital in an age of ever-evolving AI. Daron is also the editor of Redesigning AI, a look at how new technologies can be put to use in the creation of a more just society.

With James Robinson, Daron co-authored the New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty—a major work of historical, political, and cultural heft that comes along only once every few years. Throughout this ambitious, bracing work (shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award), Daron answers a question that has confounded leading minds for centuries: why are some nations rich, while others poor? Instead of looking to weather, cultural practices, or geography, we need to look to institutions, he argues—both strong and poor, political and economic— to understand prosperity and success. Called “required reading for politicians and anyone concerned with economic development” by Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel), and “a splendid piece of scholarship and a showcase of economic rigor” by The Wall Street Journal, Why Nations Fail offers illuminating solutions to our most fundamental economic problems: how to move billions out of poverty, build robust, sustainable institutions, and empower effective democracy.

Daron and James also wrote The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty: the highly anticipated follow-up to Why Nations Fail. It’s a vital, big-picture assessment of how liberty flourishes in select states, yet devolves into authoritarianism or even anarchy in others—and how liberty can keep thriving, in spite of new, global threats. The Narrow Corridor was named one of both the Financial Times and Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2019. Called “A work of staggering ambition…Smart and timely,” by Newsweek, and “Another outstanding, insightful book by Acemoglu and Robinson,” by Nobel Laureate Peter Diamond, The Narrow Corridor is an essential exploration of liberty for today’s age.

Daron is an MIT Institute Professor (the highest title awarded to faculty members) and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, inequality, labor economics, and economics of networks. He is the author of five books, including Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor. Daron has also written for mainstream magazines such as Esquire and Foreign Policy, is a regular speaker for
banks, think tanks, corporations, and other major institutions across the globe, and has received highprofile attention in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, and many more. He also co-edits academic publications, such as The Journal of Economic Growth.

A professor of Applied Economics at MIT, Daron was twice named one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, as well as the 2019 winner of the Kiel Institute’s  Global Economy Prize. He has received the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal for being a top economist under 40, the Nemmers Prize in Economics, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, and an Andrew Carnegie fellowship.

Guy Beiner

Guy Beiner is the Sullivan Chair in Irish Studies. He teaches courses on eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century Irish history as well as more general topics in late-modern history. He specializes in the historical study of remembering and forgetting. Other interests include oral history, folklore, public history and heritage, historiography, terrorism, the fin de siècle, and the ‘Spanish’ Influenza pandemic. His books on history, memory and forgetting in Ireland have won multiple international awards.

He was a professor of modern history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and has held research fellowships at Trinity College Dublin, University of Notre Dame, Central European University, University of Oxford, as well being a former Burns Scholar at Boston College. He is co-editor, with Oona Frawley and Ray Cashman, of the Indiana University Press series Irish Culture, Memory, Place.

Mary C. Murphy

Mary C. Murphy joined Boston College in Fall 2024. Her main research and teaching interests include: Ireland/Northern Ireland and the EU, peace and conflict in Northern Ireland, and the politics of Brexit on the island of Ireland. Her current research focuses on post-Brexit Northern Ireland and relations with the EU and US. In addition to being a member of the Political Science Faculty, she is the Director of the Irish Institute at Boston College.

Her latest book, co-authored with Jonathan Evershed, A Troubled Constitutional Future: Northern Ireland after Brexit, Agenda/Columbia University Press 2022, won the UACES Best Book Prize in 2023. The book examines the factors, actors and dynamics that are most likely tobe influential, and potentially transformative, in determining Northern Ireland's constitutional future after Brexit. It offers an assessment of how Brexit and its fallout may lead to constitutional upheaval, and includes a cautionary warning about the need to prepare for it.

She is also the author of Europe and Northern Ireland’s Future: Negotiating Brexit’s Unique Case, Agenda/Columbia University Press 2018 which was one of the first book-length studies of Northern Ireland and Brexit. Her previous book, Northern Ireland and the European Union: The Dynamics of a Changing Relationship, was published by Manchester University Press in 2014. She has guest edited special issues of Irish Political Studies, Administration and Irish Studies in International Affairs (forthcoming) and her work has also been published in leading academic journals including The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, International Political Science Review and Territory, Politics, Governance.

Before joining the faculty at Boston College, she was Head of the Department of Government and Politics at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the former President of the Irish Association for Contemporary European Studies, has twice been awarded an Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Chair award and holds a fellowship with the Centre on Constitutional Change at Edinburgh University. She was also previously a Fulbright-Schuman scholar and has won the Political Studies Association of Ireland (PSAI) Teaching and Learning Prize.

Robert Savage

Professor Savage teaches courses in Modern Irish, British and Atlantic World History and courses in media, film and propaganda. He also collaborates with colleagues in the Departments of Fine Arts, Philosophy and English to teach interdisciplinary courses that explore the intersection of art, memory, narrative and history. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin (Spring, 2018, Fall 2012); a Visiting Research Professor in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queens University, Belfast (2017- 2018); a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh (Spring, 2007) and a Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland Galway, (Spring 2004, Fall 2011). 

Steven Levitsky

Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022).   He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.

Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo(Brazil).

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Opinion columnist in April 2009. His column appears every Tuesday and Sunday. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic and a blogger on its website.

He is the author of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” which was published in 2025. His other books include “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery” (2021), “To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism” (2018), “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics” (2012), “Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class” (2005), “The Decadent Society” (2020) and, with Reihan Salam, “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream” (2008). He is the film critic for National Review.

He lives with his wife and four children in New Haven, Conn.

Nadine Strossen

Nadine Strossen, the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and past President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), is a Senior Fellow with FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education) and a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. She serves on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.

The National Law Journal has named Strossen one of America’s "100 Most Influential Lawyers," and several other publications have named her one of the country’s most influential women.  Her many honorary degrees and awards include the American Bar Association’s prestigious Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award (2017). In 2023, the National Coalition Against Censorship (an alliance of more than 50 national non-profit organizations) selected Strossen for its Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech.

When Strossen stepped down as ACLU President, three (ideologically diverse) Supreme Court Justices participated in her farewell/tribute luncheon: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and David Souter.

She is the author of HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (2018) and Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know® (2023).  She is also the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series on free speech that was released on public television in 2023 (and is also available on YouTube).

Her book Defending Pornography:  Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights was named a New York Times “notable book” of 1995, and was republished in 2024 as part of the New York University Press “Classic” series.  Her book HATE was selected as the “Common Read” by Washington University and Washburn University.

Strossen has made thousands of public presentations before diverse audiences around the world, including on more than 500 different campuses and in many foreign countries, and she has appeared on virtually every national TV news program.  Her hundreds of publications have appeared in many scholarly and general interest publications.

Strossen graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. Before becoming a law professor, she practiced law in Minneapolis (her hometown) and New York City. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.