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Boston College will co-host a conference April 4-5 in honor of the late James Q. Wilson, a highly respected scholar and writer who was the first Senior Fellow at the University’s Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. Wilson died last year at the age of 80.
“Thinking About Politics: A Conference Dedicated to Explaining and Perpetuating the Political Insights of James Q. Wilson” will begin with an afternoon panel discussion on April 4 at Harvard University, followed by a full day of panels on April 5 in the Heights Room of Corcoran Commons.
Panel topics will be “Parties and Organized Interests,” “Crime and Policing,” “Bureaucracy and Regulation,” “From Political Science to Policy Analysis” and “Character and Culture.”
Boston College speakers and discussants at the event will include O’Neill Professor of American Politics R. Shep Melnick, whose research focuses on the intersection of law and politics; Professor of Political Science Marc Landy, an expert on American citizenship, the presidency, and American federalism; and Martha Bayles, a faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program who writes about arts, media, and cultural policy.
Other distinguished participants include William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard; Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert A. Katzmann; David R. Mayhew, researcher on party politics and American government; and Lawrence Mead, whose work is viewed as instrumental to the American welfare reforms of the 1990s.
For more on the conference, see jqwilson.org/multimedia/thinking-about-politics.