Spring Symposium on Attachment to Place

Marsin Alshamary is a scholar of Middle Eastern politics, with a primary focus on religious institutions, civil society, and protest movements. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled: A Century of the Iraqi Hawza: How Clerics Shaped Protests and Politics in Modern Day Iraq, which explores the historical and contemporary interactions between the Shi’a religious establishment and protest movements. Her research has been published in academic journals, including The Journal of Democracy, and she has provided commentary to various media outlets such as Al Jazeera and BBC. She has also consulted for organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank. As an educator, she teaches courses on religion and the state in the Middle East, state building and revolution in the Middle East, and civil society and democracy. She holds a doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and she is currently a faculty associate in the Islamic Civilization and Societies Program at Boston College.

Fabio Benincasa is Adjunct Professor for Duquesne University – Rome Campus and Università Nicola Cusano, Italy. As well as several essays on cinema, he co-edited Come rovesciare il mondo ad arte (2015) with Giorgio de Finis and Andrea Facchi, and with de Finis Nome plurale di città (2016), and Il mondo degli umani si è fermato (2020). An independent critic and occasional curator, he is editor of Frontiere della Psicoanalisi and has collaborated with the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome.

Salim Çevik is a fellow at the Center for Applied Turkey Studies (CATS), established at the Berlin based think tank German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). Prior to joining SWP, he held researcher and/or teaching positions at Columbia University, Istanbul Bilgi University, Ipek University, Lund University and the Free University of Berlin. He received his Ph.D from the Political Science Department of Bilkent University in 2015. His main areas of research are religion in politics, democratization, nationalism, and nation building. Dr. Çevik’s most recent publications are “A Comparative Approach to Understanding Regime Trajectories of Tunisia and Turkey” published by the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (co-authored with Pelin Ayan Musil), and “New Turkey and Management of the Religious Realm: Continuities and Ruptures,” published by the European Journal of Turkish Studies.

Melanca Clark was the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Hudson-Webber Foundation through 2023. Prior to joining the Foundation, Clark held several positions in the Obama Administration, including Chief of Staff of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Senior Policy Advisor with the White House Domestic Policy Council, and Senior Counsel with DOJ’s Access to Justice Initiative. Clark also served as Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and was a John J. Gibbons Fellow in Public Interest and Constitutional Law at the Gibbons law firm and a Skadden Fellow and Assistant Counsel with the Economic Justice Group of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Presently, Clark serves as the Steering Committee Chair of the Michigan Justice Fund and on the boards of the Center for Employment Opportunities, the Council of Michigan Foundations, Downtown Detroit Partnership, Michigan Future Inc., the Michigan Center for Youth Justice, and the advisory board of LISC Detroit. Clark earned her law degree from Harvard Law School and her undergraduate degree from Brown University.

The Honorable Ronald L. Davis was nominated by President Joseph R. Biden to lead the United States Marshals Service (USMS) on April 12, 2021. As the leader of America's oldest federal law enforcement agency, Mr. Davis leads a workforce of over 10,000 professionals, spanning over 500 domestic offices within the 94 judicial districts, and four foreign field offices. Mr. Davis has served more than 28 years in law enforcement starting in 1985 with the Oakland, California, Police Department, where he served in various leadership roles, including Inspector General. In 2005, Mr. Davis became Police Chief for the City of East Palo Alto, California, and held that position for more than 8 years, dramatically reducing crime and violence in a city once named the murder capital of the United States. From 2013 to 2017, Mr. Davis served in the Obama Administration as the Director of the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). In 2014, he was also appointed by President Obama as the Executive Director of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Mr. Davis possesses a bachelor's degree from Southern Illinois University and has completed the Senior Executives in State and Local Government Program at Harvard University Kennedy School of Government.

Tiziana Dearing is the host of Radio Boston on WBUR. She’s been a commentator and contributor to WBUR for more than a decade, and has contributed to a number of other regional and national news outlets. Prior to joining the Radio Boston team, Tiziana was a professor at Boston College in the School of Social Work, where she taught social innovation and leadership. A longtime anti-poverty advocate, Tiziana also ran Boston Rising, a startup antipoverty fund to end generational poverty in Boston, and was the first woman president of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Boston. She’s won a number of awards in the city, including a Pinnacle Award from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and Boston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40.

Amanda Frost writes and teaches in the fields of immigration and citizenship law, federal courts and jurisdiction, and judicial ethics at the University of Virginia School of Law. Her scholarship has been cited by over a dozen federal and state courts, and her non-academic writing has been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New York Times, among others. Before entering academia, Frost clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and spent five years as a staff attorney at Public Citizen. She also worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee, served as acting director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at American University, and spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar studying transparency reform in the European Union. Frost is a member of a number of advisory committees and consultative groups, including the Advisory Committee for the Thaddeus Stevens & Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy. Frost has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, UCLA Law School, Université de Lyon 3, Université Paris Nanterre, and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.

Everett L. Fly is a professional landscape architect and architect based in San Antonio, Texas. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. His interdisciplinary practice has evolved over forty two years to include private, commercial and public clients. He has gained national recognition for his Black Settlements In America research and implementation projects on African American resources and communities in seventeen states and the District of Columbia. He has served on municipal and state historic review boards, prepared Historic American Buildings Survey documents, and successfully written National Register of Historic Places nominations. His preservation clients have included family groups, local governments, state agencies, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the National Park Service. In 2014 he was one of  ten recipients of the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. In 2021 he received the National Daughters of the American Revolution Historic Preservation Medal. That same year he received one of three Harvard University Graduate School of Design Alumni Awards.

Mona Hassan is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies & History at Duke University in the departments of History and Religious Studies and the program of International Comparative Studies. She obtained her Ph.D. from Princeton University and specializes in global Islamic history. Dr. Hassan’s research and publications analyze the intersections of religion, culture, gender, and politics. Her first book Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History (Princeton University Press, 2017) received the American Academy of Religion's 2017 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Historical Studies. It examines Muslim engagement with the notion of an Islamic caliphate following its loss in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries and explores how poignant memories of the lost caliphate have percolated through Muslim culture, law, and politics across Afro-Eurasia. She has also researched and published on the shifting contours of women’s Islamic legal scholarship from the emergence of the Muslim community in the seventh century to the secular interventions of modern nation-states in the present. Some of her articles in this vein reinterpret how the history of Turkish secularism continues to affect the spatial mapping and contestation of gendered religious domains in the modern Republic of Turkey.

Nicholas Hayes-Mota is Assistant Director & Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Clough Center. A public theologian and social ethicist, his research examines the connection between moral and political agency, the public role of religion in contemporary liberal democracies, and the possibility of a “politics of the common good” in today’s pluralistic and fragmented societies. To develop normative responses to these questions, Hayes-Mota draws especially on the resources of Catholic social thought and traditions of community organizing.  His work has been published in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Journal of Catholic Social Thought, Journal of Moral Theology, the T&T Clark Handbook of Public Theology, and Syndicate, among other venues. Hayes-Mota holds an AB in Social Studies, summa cum laude, from Harvard College, an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Boston College.

Daniel Kanstroom is Professor of Law and the Thomas F. Carney Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School, where he currently teaches Immigration and Refugee Law, International Human Rights Law, and Administrative Law. He is Faculty Director of the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy and co-Director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice. Professor Kanstroom has published widely in the fields of U.S. immigration law, human rights, criminal law, and European citizenship and asylum law.  His major works include Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora (Oxford University Press 2012) and Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Harvard University Press 2007), and he is currently completing a book entitled Deportation World: Dynamic Sovereignty and the Future of Migrants’ Rights (forthcoming Harvard University Press). His articles, book reviews and op-eds have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the New York Times, the French Gazette du Palais, and many other venues.

Jonathan Laurence is Director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy and Professor of Political Science at Boston College. His principal areas of teaching and research are comparative politics and religion and politics in Western Europe, Turkey and North Africa. His latest book is Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism and the Modern State (Princeton University Press), which received the 2022 Hubert Morken Award from the American Political Science Association for Best Book in religion and politics. Previously, The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims (Princeton University Press), received awards for Best Book in religion and politics and for Best Book in migration and citizenship from the APSA in 2013. Laurence’s first book, Integrating Islam: Religious and Political Challenges in Contemporary France (Brookings Institution Press), co-authored with Justin Vaïsse, was named an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association in 2007. Laurence has published numerous academic articles, several edited volumes and assorted essays and commentary in national and international news media. He completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell University and received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.

Chandra Mallampalli is a historian of modern South Asia with interests in religious pluralism, nationalism, and the secular state. He joins the Clough Center with an interest in examining challenges facing India’s multi-religious democracy, especially in light of the surging Hindu nationalism and violence against religious minorities. This year, as a Visiting Fellow, Dr. Mallampalli is researching the unfolding conflict in Manipur (northwest India), where conflict over the rights and privileges of tribal communities has assumed religious overtones, resulting in the destruction of churches and other religious structures.  He is the author of four books and many articles, which examine the intersection of religion, law, and society in colonial India. His scholarship and teaching span the fields of modern India, British Empire, World History, and Global Christianity.  His recent book with Oxford University Press (New York), South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim, describes how the lives of Roman Catholics, Syrian Christians, and Protestants have been shaped by centuries of interactions with Hindus and Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. 

Bejan Matur was born in the ancient Hittite city of Maraş, in 1968. She is a pioneering figure in contemporary poetry. Her poems were translated into 44 different languages, and granted with numerous awards. She was hosted at countless conferences and festivals in many countries. She wrote articles and essays, and published 11 books, 9 of which is poetry. Her music accompanied poetry was presented to a wide audience at prestigious stages like Royal Opera House, King Place London and Princeton University. In 2012, her book How Abraham Abandoned Me (Arc, 2012) became the "Recommended Translation for Spring 2012" by the Poetry Book Society founded by T.S. Eliot. Bejan Matur is a graduate of the Ankara University Faculty of Law, and currently lives between Berlin and Istanbul.

Roberta Micallef is Professor of the Practice in World Languages and Literatures at Boston University. She teaches courses on modern Middle Eastern Literature, Modern Middle Eastern Film, Turkic Literatures, and Travel Literature. Micallef is a core faculty member in the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Program. She is also an active member of the Turkish language teaching community, having served as the Executive Secretary and the President of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages. Micallef’s scholarly works reflect her interest in foreign language pedagogy as well as literary studies. She has received funding for and led national projects on Turkish proficiency guidelines, Curricular Framework for Turkish.  Micallef’s literary scholarship is focused on women’s narratives and an investigation of the “female gaze.” Her research resulted in publications about Turkish women and their agency, whether as political prisoners or travelers. Micallef is the co-editor of On the Wonders of Land and Sea Persianate Travel Writing (2013) and editor of Illusion and Disillusionment Travel Writing in the Modern Age (2018). She is the recipient of the Susan Jackson award (2020).

Thomas W. Mitchell is a national expert on property issues facing disadvantaged families and communities, and has published leading scholarly works addressing these matters in academic journals, government publications, and publications for trade associations such as the American Bar Association. Mitchell holds the Robert F. Drinan, S.J. Endowed Chair at BC Law and serves as the Director of the Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights, which seeks to help disadvantaged people and communities acquire and secure important property rights. Prior to joining Boston College in 2022, Mitchell engaged in extensive law reform and policy work, most prominently serving as the principal drafter of a widely adopted uniform real property act named the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), which is designed to substantially enhance the ability of disadvantaged families to maintain ownership of their property and their property-related generational wealth. In 2020, Professor Mitchell was named one of 21 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of the substantial impact his professional work has had in assisting disadvantaged farmers and property owners.

Lindsey O’Rourke joined Boston College’s Political Science department in autumn 2014. Her research interests include international relations theory, U.S. foreign policy, international security, and military strategy. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the causes, conduct, and consequences of U.S.-orchestrated covert regime changes during the Cold War, as well as a series of related articles on the impact of regime change on interstate relations. Before joining the faculty at Boston College, O’Rourke was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago.

Madeline Ostrander is a science journalist and writer whose work has appeared in the NewYorker.com, The Nation, Sierra magazine, PBS's NOVA Next, Slate, and numerous other outlets. Her reporting on climate change and environmental justice has taken her to locations such as the Alaskan Arctic and the Australian outback. She has received grants, fellowships, and residencies from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Artist Trust, the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and Edith Cowan University in Australia. Ostrander is the former senior editor of YES! magazine and holds a master's degree in environmental science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In her most recent book, At Home on an Unruly Planet (2022), she  reflects on the climate crisis not as an abstract scientific or political problem but as a palpable force that is now affecting all of us at home. She offers vivid accounts of people fighting to protect places they love from increasingly dangerous circumstances.

Bish Sanyal is the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning and Director of the Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS)/ Hubert Humphrey program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served as Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT from 1994 to 2002 and was the chair of the entire MIT faculty from 2007 to 2009. Sanyal’s research covers a range of topics, including housing projects and policies in newly industrializing nations, urban informal economy, planning organizations and theories of project implementation, history of planning ideas, and international planning education. His extensive research publications include Breaking the Boundaries – A One-World Approach to Planning Education (1990, Plenum Press) and Hybrid Planning Cultures in Comparative Planning Cultures (2005, Routledge). He recently completed a 10-million-dollar research project (Sole Project Investigator) to create a comprehensive initiative on technology evaluation (CITE) at MIT and he is currently engaged in completing two book manuscripts, titled Hidden Successes: Good Bureaucratic Performance in Developing Nations and Transfer of Planning Ideas: Why Some Work While Others Fail. Prof. Sanyal has served as a consultant for numerous organizations, from the United Nations Development Program to the Ford Foundation.

Lacee Satcher is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at Boston College. Her primary research interests include race/ethnicity, health & place, and environmental justice. Other interests include place & inequality, social psychology of health, and urban sociology. Her most recent work focuses on the race-environment-health connection, specifically how various individual social identities/social locations structure our relations with and within space and place to shape health outcomes, health experiences, and place attachment. Her conceptualization of these relations include the term 'multiply-deserted areas' which describes the co-occurring resource scarcity in urban, Black neighborhoods resulting from processes of environmental racism and racial capitalism. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Vanderbilt University as well as a MA in Sociology and a BA in Psychology from Jackson State University and Tougaloo College, respectively.  She has co-authored papers in the areas of environmental justice, identity & higher education, African American health, and Black women's mental health. She has sole-authored papers on the race/class associations and health consequences of living in multiply-deserted areas on the horizon.

Priya Satia is an American historian of the British Empire and the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University. Prof. Satia is a cultural historian of the material and intellectual infrastructure of the modern world in the age of empire. Her work examines the origins of state institutions, military technologies, ideas and practices of development, and the anti-colonial responses they inspired in order to understand how the imperial past has shaped the present and how the ethical dilemmas it posed were understood and managed. Her award-winning books include Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008); Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin Press/Duckworth, 2018); and Time's Monster: How History Makes History (Belknap HUP/Penguin Allen Lane, 2020). Her work has also appeared in major scholarly journals including American Historical Review, Humanity, and History Workshop Journal. Satia is working on a new book project, The Lake of Liberation, on British colonialism in Punjab and its legacies.

Anina Schwarzenbach is a sociologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, University of Bern. Her work lies at the intersection of sociology, criminology, and computational social sciences and focuses on social threats and governmental responses, social networks, media narratives, polarization, and state legitimacy. She has also worked extensively on issues related to institutional discrimination and policing of minorities. In her current project, in collaboration with the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, Boston College, she analyzes the media discourse on violent extremism and its consequences on public opinion. Previously, Dr. Schwarzenbach was a fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Cyber Project (2020-2022), a Belfer Center International Security Program postdoctoral fellow (2018-2020), as well as a member of the Belfer team that built the National Cyber Power Index 2020. For her research, she was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) postdoc mobility grant and a Fondazione Leonardo research grant.

Peter Skerry is professor of political science at Boston College and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.  He is also a contributing editor at American Purpose and a member of the editorial board of Society.  He was previously professor of political science at Claremont McKenna College, and taught political science at UCLA, where he was Director of Washington Programs at the Center for American Politics and Public Policy. He was also Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Professor Skerry has published in a variety of scholarly and general interest publications. He is author of Counting on the Census: Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics (Brookings) and Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority (Free Press/Harvard University Press), which was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.  He is currently completing a study of Muslims in the United States, From the Brotherhood to the Neighborhood: Muslims in American Society and Politics.

Noah P. Snyder is Professor and Chair in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College, where he also directed the interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Program from 2010-2018. His research focuses on river ecology and restoration using fluvial geomorphology, field-based measurements, and remote sensing to measure the short- and long-term responses of rivers to change. The author or co-author of more than forty refereed articles and reports, Snyder’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Harvard Forest. Snyder received his Ph.D. in geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a graduate of Bates College.

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He speaks five and reads ten European languages. His most recent major works include Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017); and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018). His essays are collected in Ukrainian History, Russian Politics, European Futures (2014), and The Politics of Life and Death (2015).  Snyder’s work has appeared in forty languages and has received a number of prizes, including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. Snyder was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford and holds state orders from Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. He has appeared in documentaries, on network television, and in major films. His books have inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions, films, sculpture, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play, and an opera. Synder is currently researching a family history of nationalism and finishing a philosophical book about freedom.

Laura Steinberg is the Seidner Family Executive Director of the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College. Dr. Steinberg has worked extensively on research in infrastructure management, disaster preparedness and response, environmental modeling, and higher education leadership. She served on the EPA Science Advisory Board, Drinking Water Committee and as an editor and advisory board member for Natural Hazards Review, Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and the Journal of Environmental Engineering. For the American Society of Civil Engineers, she served three terms as a member of the Industry Leaders Council representing civil engineering faculty members throughout the United States.

Jonathan Wyrtzen is associate professor of sociology, history, and international affairs at Yale University. Wyrtzen’s teaching and research engage questions related to empire and colonialism, state formation and non-state forms of political organization, ethnicity and nationalism, and religion and socio-political action.  His work focuses on society and politics in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly with regards to interactions catalyzed by the expansion of European empires into this region. His first book, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Cornell University Press, 2015) examines how European colonial intervention in Morocco (1912–1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed. His second book, Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2022), reexamines how the First World War unmade the greater Ottoman political order that had shaped the Middle East for centuries and opened up the possibility for local and European actors to reimagine political identities and political futures within the region.