Grant Recipients

Adriana Maria Gonzalez

Adriana Maria Gonzalez is a Neuroscience and Political Science major in the class of 2021. Adriana Maria is from a small city in central Mexico called Morelia which is where her internship this summer was located. Humaslow, a humanist college, focuses its work on multidisciplinary social work as it promotes an education model based on human development and social conscientiousness. They provide continuing education for low income professionals, especially in the public education sector which is composed by a majority of poor women who generally do not have access to higher education. They work to provide tools for low income social workers and educators so that they can strengthen and improve the Mexican education system from the bottom up. Humaslow lives by its mission of“educating to dignify” as they are committed to educating those who want to lead “at the service of humanity with equality and solidarity.”

At Humaslow, Adriana Maria worked with their ESL and Psychology departments by creating didactic course material for their summer session. She was most excited to work in the Psychology department where she applied her bilingual skills and background as a Neuroscience major in researching relevant literature in the field that is not available in the Spanish language. The shortage of available literature in Spanish deeply affects the scope of the courses taught in non-English speaking countries and Adriana Maria looked forward to aid in something that will be so transformative for the institution. Adriana Maria chose to intern at Humaslow not only because of their mission, but also because of their unprecedented work that recognizes education as a fundamental pillar of society.

After graduation Adriana Maria hopes to go to law school in the U.S.; her majors may seem incompatible at first glance, but  she believesthat science will be the key to changing public policy in a way where we best serve our present and future generations.  Adriana Maria hopesto work with children from all over the world and help set policy in place that will allow them to live a dignified life with health, food, education, and happiness regardless of hardship that they have had to overcome. As someone who has reaped the benefits of an American education, Adriana Maria wants to dedicate her professional career to spreading a quality standard of life for all children without needing to leave their home country as she did. Adriana Maria believes that in today’s globalized world, it is time to look beyond ourselves and strive to be the best for all and she hopes to contribute to this mission, not only through this internship, but also after graduating from the Heights.

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Abigail Hunt

Abby Hunt is from Lake Zurich, Illinois. At Boston College, Abby is majoring in Communication and Political Science, and minoring in Journalism. Abby plays three instruments—the piano, guitar, and ukulele—and she is a member of the Boston College Piano Ensemble. Abby is also the managing editor at The Heights, BC’s independent student newspaper. As the managing editor, Abby meets with the paper’s six sections to plan upcoming stories, and she reads all articles before they are published to ensure that they meet The Heights’ journalistic standards. Before she was the managing editor, Abby was the associate news editor, a copy editor, and a staff writer. Abby has been reporting and editing for The Heights since the beginning of her freshman year, and has written all types of stories during her time on the paper—from campus updates to Boston news to arts reviews.

This summer, Abby worked as an intern at WGBH News. While she was also a WGBH intern last fall, her job looked significantly different this summer, as she was working remotely. As a news intern, Abby was responsible for completing a variety of different tasks, including conducting research on news topics, interviewing sources, pulling and editing sound clips, and writing scripts that were used in daily newscasts. Additionally, Abby assisted WGBH journalists with scheduling and other miscellaneous tasks that need to be covered.

Abby plans on pursuing a career in journalism after graduation, which is why she was so excited for the opportunity to gain valuable experience in the field this summer. Abby believes that in difficult times such as the ones we find ourselves in now, objective and accurate reporting is more important than ever.

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Kai Jorgensen

 Kai Jorgensen is a Boston College Political Science and History Major, from the class of 2021. Kai is 21 years old and from Westford, Massachusetts. Kai graduated Westford Academy in 2017, and was very involved in her theater program, acting in quite a few plays and even directing one. Many of her family members are graduates of Boston College (her mother, Dawn Funaki(Class of ‘91) and her father, Luke Jorgensen (Class of ‘91). Her little brother Eamon Jorgensen, also attends Boston College (Class of ‘23)). During the school year, Kai worked as a stage technician for Robsham Theater Arts at Boston College. She also does sound design for student productions. In her free time Kai is involved with the Young Democratic Socialists of Boston College (serving as vice-president her sophomore and junior year), and the Retro Game Club of Boston College.

During the summer, Kai worked with City Councilor-at-large Michelle Wu, in her office at Boston City Hall. Michelle Wu has been a member of the City Council since 2014, and is the first Asian-American woman to serve on the council. She and her office work on pushing progress policies in Boston. In this internship, Kai worked on public policy, research and writing legislation. Kai was also involved with serving the constituents of the city of Boston. After graduating Kai hopes to pursue a career in public policy as she is very passionate about legislation and working to build a more just society. Kai hopes to find work in local politics, serving communities that she is a part of, where she can see how her work directly impacts her neighbors. Kai is most interested in working in Boston, or another city in Massachusetts, as she has lived her whole life here, and considers Massachusetts her home. At some point, Kai would like to pursue a Master’s Degree in public policy, but for now she is intent on getting some experience under her belt. Overall, Kai could not be more excited to be involved with the Clough Center. 

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Bozhena Kulchyckyj

Bozhena Kulchyckyj is a junior from Maryland, in the Carroll School of Management, concentrating in Information Systems and Business Analytics and double majoring in Studio Art focusing in Design.

Bozhena is on the executive board for the Shea Center for Entrepreneurship at Boston College and spends much of her time working with student entrepreneurs on campus and in the Boston Area. She is very enthusiastic about the entrepreneurial environment as well as the rising tech industry. Bozhena has co-founded two startups throughout her time in high school and at BC, she is very passionate about helping bring ideas to reality. With her focus in tech, in her free time, Bozhena works on developing websites and researching and learning different programs in User Experience and User Interface Design. She also volunteers and helps teach Ukrainian Dance to 2-5-year-old children at her local church.

Bozhena studied Arabic and Russian in high school as well as took a diplomatic course at the US State Department her senior year. She hopes to study and work internationally, understanding the tech industry from a global perspective.

After establishing an online donation system for the Maryland Theater for the Performing Arts, with a goal of raising $17 million dollars, Bozhena found an increasing gap with the constant developments in tech and the processes organizations had with keeping up with these changes. There was a growing need for tech skills and organizations did not have the resources to utilize and adapt to changes in tech properly. This past summer, Bozhena worked for Fisherman, a Boston based organization whose main goal is to help small restaurant businesses leverage advantages in technology that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. Fisherman works towards fixing the issue of the technology gap, focusing on creating websites, starting with smaller restaurant businesses, providing assistance in an industry that is constantly growing.

Bozhena hopes to help businesses learn and adapt in a tech-centric focused world. She helped to develop a more efficient solution to delivery applications, aiding in the support of organizations and helping provide them with an online solution to continue their work in a growing virtual world.  

After graduation, Bozhena hopes to enter the tech and design industry, to pursue a career with an international focus. She is extremely grateful for the support she has received from Boston College and is very excited for the opportunities to come this summer.

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Mahima Menghani

Mahima Menghani is a senior in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences from Waltham, Massachusetts. She is majoring in International Studies with a concentration in Political Economy & Development Studies and a minor in Finance. On campus, she has served as an Undergraduate Research Fellow for Professor Peter Krause in the Political Science Department. She also completed an Advanced Study Grant for a project titled “The Evolution of Geriatric Care in an Industrialized India,” which explored the sociopolitical consequences of economic development and the demand for a nursing home system in India. Last year, she interned with the Securities & Financial Fraud Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Massachusetts. There, she gained exposure to the federal criminal justice system while contributing to the prosecution of major financial crimes.

This past summer, Mahima interned with the Criminal Bureau of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office (AGO). The AGO serves as the chief law enforcement officer for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, ensuring that Massachusetts residents are protected from harm and advocating for their rights in the judicial system. As an undergraduate intern, she was assigned to current Assistant Attorney Generals and assisted them in completing various administrative tasks necessary in the case preparation process. She also had the opportunity to sit in on meetings between the prosecution and defense teams as well as trials in the courtroom. The AGO is committed to serving the diverse and evolving needs of the Commonwealth, and Mahima was excited to take part in AG Maura Healey’s progressive initiatives.

Eventually, Mahima hopes to attend law school and to specialize in a field pertaining to her business and public policy interests. The internship program at the AGO provided her with the perfect opportunity to build on the knowledge she gained in her previous criminal justice internship and supplement her pre-law education in a rewarding environment. Her work as an undergraduate, even if minimal, will ultimately contribute to the prosecution of cases that set important precedents and progress the ideals of equity and inclusion around which the judicial system was formed. Mahima is thankful for the Civic Internship Grant, which allowed her to participate in this unpaid internship with the AGO. She looks forward to serving as a Clough Center Junior Fellow and continuing to define her career path.

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Jenna Santos

Jenna is a senior in the Morrissey College of Arts and Science studying Biology with a minor in Medical Humanities. Not too far from Boston College, Jenna is originally from Melrose, MA and spent her fall semester of junior year abroad at University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand where she had the opportunity to be a microbiology and immunology student. On campus, Jenna is ‘Big’ to a ‘Little’ at the Edison Elementary School through BC Bigs which is partnered with Big Sister of Eastern Massachusetts. She is also the treasure of the Boston College Bioethics Society, and a Co-President for the Boston College Women in Science and Technology Program which runs a free 4 weekend college lab immersion program for local girls in high school interested in pursuing careers in STEM. Throughout the school year, Jenna has served as an intern for the local non-profit, Razia’s Ray of Hope Foundation where she works on the Sponsorship Team in order to provide young girls of De Subz, Afghanistan education at the fully funded Zabuli Education Center. In her free time, Jenna volunteers at the Blum Resource Center at Dana Farber and loves to hike and be outside with friends and family.

Over the summer, Jenna worked with Dr. Bethany Hedt-Gauthier as an assistant to her research projects at Harvard Medical School. Jenna was doing research in conjunction with contributions from three separate organizations: Harvard Medical School/Chan School of Public Health, Partners in Health, and The University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda.

During her time in this position, she supported Dr. Hedt’s research team through performing data cleaning, analyses and writing for two specific projects: 1) cesarean care and outcomes in rural Rwanda and 2) fostering equity in global health research partnerships. Under the mentorship of Dr. Hedt, Jenna saw how academic institutions and non-profits can work together, contributing different services, in order to make progress towards a common goal of global health equity.

Through her time at Boston College, Jenna has appreciated sections of her course work dedicated to Women and Maternal Public Health. Jenna is grateful for this unique opportunity that will allow her to deepen her sense of vocation through gaining a specific understanding of the complexities of global health provision related to topics she hopes to pursue in her future career.

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Madison Sarka

Madison Sarka grew up in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.  Madison is a Junior at Boston College majoring in Political Science and minoring in Global Public Health and the Common Good in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences. On campus she is involved in the student-led Public Health Club, in which she held an internship position this past year, volunteering for the American Red Cross and FCD Prevention Works every week.  Madison was also a PULSE student this year, volunteering weekly at Haley House Soup Kitchen in South Boston, a soup kitchen that focuses not only on feeding the food-insecure but also on strengthening and unifying the community.  During her time so far at Boston College, Madison has realized her interests in law, politics, healthcare, and social justice.  
 
As a rising Sophomore, I was an intern for U.S. Senator Susan Collins in her Portland, Maine office where I was involved with community outreach projects lead by the Cumberland County District Attorney’s Office.  This past summer, I was interning in the District Attorney’s Office, working more on community outreach efforts, assisting in the preparation for and observing court sessions, and gaining insight into both the in-court and out-of-court responsibilities of the District Attorney.  Madison was present in community-wide meetings focused on substance abuse issues, mental health issues, recidivism reduction, and victim advocacy within the county where she has lived most of her life.  Additionally, Madison was asked to compare these experiences to those she had volunteering in Boston and discuss her observations regarding community issues faced by a big city compared to those of the relatively small city of Portland.  From this opportunity, Madison not only gained insight into the field of law, but also the vital role which the District Attorney’s office plays in the community by promoting justice, public safety, and giving a voice to victims.  
 
After graduation, Madison hopes to attend law school, and eventually use her education to support justice within her community, perhaps within the discipline of healthcare law and policy. Madison hopes to use the experiences she has had volunteering, interning for public servants, and her time at BC learning to become a woman for others in order to build a career in the service of the common good.  Madison is  truly grateful to the Clough Center for enabling her to continue to explore her interests and further define her career path, and she is honored to be appointed a Junior Fellow for the academic year. 

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Rachel Vatelia

Rachel Vatelia is a Senior in the Morrissey College of Arts and Science from Canton, Masachusetts. She double majored in Philosophy and History with a focus concentration in Identities, Inequality and Justice. At Boston College, Rachel serves as the president of Voices of Imani, a captain leading Boston College’s most prestigious mock trial team, and an executive board member for Black Christian Fellowship. Rachel is also a part-time ESL volunteer teacher with Educational Development Group in Boston and Hatian Creole interpreter for PAIR Project immigration and asylum services.

As a result of her deep-rooted passion for the equitable advancement of society, in 2016 she co-founded the Vatelia Foundation; a humanitarian organization that works in partnership with communities around the world to create and establish sustainable solutions for poverty. In pursuit of living as a global citizen through academia, Rachel was the 2019 recipient of the Amanda V. Houston Fellowship. Rachel is committed to challenging ideologies surrounding race, social class, and gender that have dichotomized the American experience.

This past summer Rachel worked as a publication intern with We-Empower in Washington D.C.. We-Empower is an international development organization that supports interventions that enable members of poor households to profitably strengthen their self-reliant and sustainable means of agricultural production. The organization recognizes the complex interactions between humans, animals and the environment, and works with communities towards sustainable development. We-Empower brings many years of related Food Security project experience that include but are not limited to agriculture, agri-business, livestock, anti-bacterial, seed storage, and grain storage. As an intern, Rachel will work closely with leading food security professors to produce a publication regarding pesticide in African agriculture systems.

As a black, Haitian-American woman, Rachel recognizes how the combination of her race, ethnicity, language and heritage, creates a rich compound of elements that further complicate how she is perceived and categorized in the United States and the world. Her passion and dedication to reveal the complexities of immigration, blackness and womanhood stems from her personal struggle to understand the cultural meaning of her history, race, and gender. Rachel’s primary desire is to radically shift antiquated precepts that have been integrated into global culture. After her tenure at Boston College, Rachel will attend law school to pursue a career in international law, advising world leaders on the complex yet delicate science of effective international relations.

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Dennis Wieboldt III

Dennis Wieboldt is a junior in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences studying History and Theology. His academic interests lie at the intersection of America’s historiographical construction and the U.S. legal system, remaining mindful of America’s rich religious landscape. He is the 2020 recipient of the Nicholas H. Woods Award for Student Leadership and a researcher at the Boston College Center for Christian-Jewish Learning where he is completing a project on interreligious approaches to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On campus, Dennis is a Student Assembly Representative in the Undergraduate Government of Boston College, an advisor to the Church in the 21st Century Center, and an ELL tutor.

After completing a recent internship with the Massachusetts Judicial Nomination Commission, Dennis will join the New Jersey General Assembly in the Office of Assemblyman Erik Peterson. As a legislative intern, he will assist the assemblyman with organizing constituent services information, drafting legislative correspondences, reviewing proposed legislation, and
preparing for committee hearings. 

Dennis’s interest in a position with the General Assembly arose from his previous work with state and local government: after the horrific shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, he and a fellow classmate initiated conversations with their local prosecutor and high school administration to provide a student’s perspective on school safety protocols. Through this experience, Dennis not only began to recognize the importance of community engagement at the state and local levels, but also the role that state law plays in our democratic scheme. In conversation with his research endeavors and academic interests, Dennis hopes that his time with the General Assembly will aid in his preparation for a career in the legal field.

John E. Carter
Theology

After obtaining his J.D. at Duke University School of Law and working as an attorney, primarily in constitutional civil defense litigation, John changed course and began his theological education at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, where he received his M.Div. During this time, he spent one semester at the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C., as the Moyers Scholar. After graduating, John was ordained as an American Baptist minister and completed his clinical pastoral education while working as a chaplain at hospitals in Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina. In 2015, he received a Th.M. in moral theology from the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, writing his thesis on conscience and religious liberty in the Baptist and Catholic traditions, and began his doctoral studies in the theology department of Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences that fall.

Working at the intersections of theology and law, and of Baptist and Catholic theological ethics, John’s research interests vary widely. He completed the certificate program of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice and has published journal articles on how the need of Southern Baptist-supported universities to accept federal assistance in the 1960s worked to change Baptist understandings of the relationship between church and state and on the relationship between Catholic and Baptist understandings of the conscience. He also has a forthcoming article rethinking the influence of Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius on the international law and natural law traditions.

In the fall of 2019, John began work on his dissertation entitled “The Communitarian Conscience: A Theological Response to the Legal Debates about Religious Freedom” under the supervision of Dr. Cathleen Kaveny. This project examines the current legal inability in the U.S. to respond to claims that compliance with generally applicable laws may violate the individual religious conscience and proposes that as an essential element of resolving this impasse, a new understanding of the conscience must be developed within the Christian tradition. That is, the solution cannot be a purely legal or political solution imposed on Christians, as this will only heighten legitimate concern about an epistemological crisis within the Christian tradition itself. Moreover, this impasse is itself the result of an impoverished understanding of the conscience within the Christian tradition which emphasizes subjective beliefs about the morality of an act rather than the collective determinations about moral action which have always been a part of the Christian understanding of the conscience. A central part of this project is a clarification that rejecting a liberal individualist understanding of the conscience does not mean a return to the legalist understanding of the conscience so dominant in the Catholic church up through the Second Vatican Council. Instead, this project argues for an “open communitarian” option grounded in Catholic personalism, an option which can stabilize the relationship between religious and secular traditions for Christians without the need to resort either to a sectarian withdrawal from society or to the individually sized “religious liberty” protections adopted in current jurisprudence.

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Ruilin Chen
Sociology

Ruilin is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Boston College. Ruilin is trained as a quantitative sociologist with a special focus on computational methods, including social network analysis and natural language processing. His research interests span broadly across consumption, race and neighborhood.

In the past, Ruilin has used web scraping to collect restaurant information from Yelp to study food access disparities to answer a food consumption question that has profound economic, social and even legal implications. From the existing literature on “food deserts”, we have already known that different neighborhoods tend to attract different food retailers. Among food scholars, this phenomenon is often termed as “supermarket/restaurant/retail redlining” as it implies that people living in neighborhoods of certain racial backgrounds are more likely to be denied easy access to supermarkets and full-service restaurants in their community. From a legal perspective, however, this is a serious charge against retail businesses, especially against chain-store brands such as Walmart and Whole Food. Using the racial background of a consumer or that of a neighborhood to reject service would be a clear violation of the Civil Rights Act. Therefore, before we label what we have observed as “redlining”, Ruilin proposes that it is important to understand exactly what we have found, and why. Using data collected from diverse sources including traditional surveys and new big data sources, Ruilin's research attempts to provide a comprehensive assessment of the distribution of different food access across space as well as along the line of race, and explore possible mechanisms that can explain the access gap

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Megan Crotty
English

Megan Crotty is a 5th-year PhD in the English Department, and this is her second year participating in the Clough Fellowship. Her work focuses on postcolonial literature of Ireland and the British Commonwealth, and seeks to illuminate collaboration and complicity between subjects in these former colonies that circumvent the former colonial center. The focus of her dissertation is women, violence, and trauma in contemporary Anglophone literature.

Megan works at the Center for Teaching Excellence as a Learning Technology Assistant. She has also received a grant from the Institute for Liberal Arts, with the help of Eric Weiskott and Marjorie Howes. This grant supports creating community, programming, and visibility for first-generation college and graduate students enrolled in MA or PhD programs in the English and History departments.

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Ilaria D’Angelis
Economics

Ilaria D’Angelis is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Boston College. She received her bachelor’s degree in International Relations and Diplomatic Affairs from the University of Bologna (Italy). The social and economic developments caused by the European Sovereign Debt Crisis motivated Ilaria to study Economics, while she was an exchange student at SciencesPo in Paris (France). After earning her master of arts in Economics from the University of Bologna, and working as a research intern at the Bank of Italy, she joined the Department of Economics at Boston College in 2016.
Ilaria’s field of expertise is Labor Economics. Her main research interests concern the causes and consequences of inequality in pay in the labor market.

Part of Ilaria’s research explores the determinants of labor market outcomes of young, college educated male and female workers. In particular, she investigates how these outcomes are shaped by workers’ preferences for employment benefits, frictions in job search, and the types of job offers that job searchers receive. Analyzing 21st century U.S. labor market entrants, her research shows that young women are as likely as men to find or lose a job. However, young female workers tend to receive job offers entailing lower wages relative to men, especially so when they are offered work benefits such as parental leave and workhours flexibility. Thus, the gender pay gap expands when employers provide amenities. Because male and female young workers are found to share similar preferences for benefits, their availability generates similar utility gains across genders, thus not fully compensating women for the wage losses they incur relative to men with higher overall welfare. The expansion of the wage and utility gender gaps due to the provision of amenities is particularly detrimental for young women in executive and professional careers.

In other research, Ilaria analyzes long-run trends in overtime work in the United States. Work hours and the likelihood of working more than 40 hours per week (overtime) increased dramatically in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, especially among highly educated male workers. To the contrary, in the 2000s and the 2010s workhours fell, and the incidence of overtime work decreased strongly among young college graduate workers. In her project, Ilaria links long run trends in work hours to long run trends in U.S. wage inequality, and studies whether the 21st century reversal in the secular pattern of overtime work can be the outcome of a shrinkage in the range of career opportunities available to college graduate workers.

In 2019/20, Ilaria was awarded the Felter Family Fund Summer Dissertation Fellowship from Boston College for outstanding progress in her research.

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Magnus Ferguson
Philosophy

Magnus Ferguson is a fourth-year PhD student in the Philosophy Department at Boston College. He received his BA in Religion from Columbia University. His research interests are in social epistemology, 20th-century European philosophy, and feminist philosophy. He is especially interested in phenomenological perspectives on epistemic injustice, linguistic alienation, and resilient forms of social ignorance. 

Magnus’ current research focuses on the relationship between responsibility and social ignorance. Drawing from contemporary social epistemology of race and gender, 20th-century hermeneutical philosophy, and the work of Hannah Arendt, his dissertation calls for a clearer distinction between responsibility and culpability, arguing that one can be responsible for intervening on harms even when one is merely affiliated with them through membership in a social group or institution. Drawing a clearer distinction between guilt and responsibility helps to clarify our social and political obligations to correct for complicated forms of ignorance-based wrongdoing (such as implicit bias) that can be difficult to unambiguously classify as culpable or non-culpable.

Magnus has taught several introductory courses in the philosophy department (“Philosophy of the Person I & II”) and co-taught an advanced seminar, “Philosophy of Language.” In the fall of 2020, in addition to teaching at Boston College he will also be a Visiting Lecturer at Tufts University teaching a course called “Ethics of Ignorance.” He was awarded the Donald J. White Teaching Award for excellence in teaching in 2019, and the Hans-Georg Gadamer Essay Prize for his paper “Hermeneutical Justice in Fricker, Dotson, and Arendt” (forthcoming in Epoché, Fall 2020).

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Laura Gáti
Economics

Laura Gáti is a Ph.D. student of Economics at Boston College. Her road toward the PhD led her through a B.A. in Economics from the University of Bern, Switzerland, an M.A. in Economics and another M.A. in Art History, both from the University of Bern, and, lastly, an M.A. in Economics from Boston College. Prior to joining Boston College, she has led the double life of an economist at the Swiss National Bank in Zürich, Switzerland and an art curator and co-founder of the artist-in-residence program residency.ch in Bern.

Laura’s research interests fall within the categories of quantitative macroeconomics and monetary economics, with a special focus on expectations. A recurring theme in her work is the role of expectations for aggregate fluctuations. Laura applies the tools of both quantitative macro modeling and information design from micro theory to study the (usually nonlinear) interplay of expectations and the macroeconomy.  

In her job market paper, Laura explores the interaction between the conduct of monetary policy and the potential for unanchored expectations. The point of departure of the project is central bankers’ insistence on the importance of anchoring expectations, even as the assumptions of textbook monetary theory rule out the possibility of unanchored expectations. To fill this gap in macroeconomic theory, Laura lays out an adaptive learning model of expectations that can become anchored or unanchored in response to the central bank’s behavior, and solves for optimal monetary policy in the context of this model. Initial results show that the potential unanchoring of expectations introduces novel intertemporal tradeoffs for the monetary authority, as well as the disappearance of the time-inconsistency problem of optimal policy under rational expectations.

A second project picks up where the first left off: at the idea that the central bank explicitly manages the time series of expectations. While in her job market paper, Laura considers the interest rate as the central bank’s policy tool, in this project she turns to communication by central banks. In particular, the paper generalizes the static communication game encountered in the economic literatures on Bayesian persuasion and global games to a dynamic setting. The contribution of the paper is the emphasis on the temporal dimension of communication policy: when to communicate and about what matters in an environment where both fundamentals and beliefs exhibit serial correlation and there is a feedback loop between the two time series.

Yet another project speaks to the empirical side of Laura’s interests: structural VARs and model estimation via impulse-response matching. There is a large consensus in the economics profession on technological progress as one of the most fundamental engines of economic growth. This research project delves deeper into this commonly held view and explores one specific root of technological progress: investment in information and communication technology (ICT) goods. First, the SVAR results document the hump-shaped dynamics of output following ICT innovations. Second, the estimation of a two-sector growth model attributes the observed dynamics to the general-purpose nature of ICT goods.

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Nicholas Hayes-Mota
Theology

Nicholas Hayes-Mota is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in Theological Ethics at Boston College, with a minor in Systematic Theology. He holds a Master of Divinity from the Harvard Divinity School (2014), and an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard College (2008). Prior to beginning his studies at Boston College, Nicholas was a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he worked with Marshall Ganz to study and train others in community organizing. Beyond the academy, Nicholas has also worked as a faith-based community organizer, lay minister, and a leadership development coach.

Nicholas’s research engages the intersections of political theology, social ethics, virtue ethics, and ecclesiology. As a Catholic theological ethicist, he works within the traditions of Catholic social teaching and the broader stream of Thomistic political thought from which it developed. His governing interest is in how the normative frameworks offered by the Thomistic tradition translate into effective democratic political praxis in contemporary societies, at both the individual and institutional levels. Conversely, his research also explores how specific, historically and institutionally embedded traditions of political praxis might inform and further develop the Thomistic tradition itself—in other words, how “theory” can learn from “praxis.” Though his primary questions are ethical and theological in nature, therefore, Nicholas’s work draws on a variety of empirical and practical disciplines, from which he is always eager to learn.

Within this larger vein, Nicholas’s dissertation project focuses on the historical and theological relationship between Thomistic political theology and the tradition of community organizing first developed by Saul Alinsky in the United States in the 1930s. More specifically, the project examines the way in which the Alinsky tradition of organizing offers a model for a “politics of the common good,” and provides resources for critically re-imagining and reconstructing this central concept of the Thomistic political tradition (and of Catholic social thought more broadly). The study proposes a shift from construing the common good in principally dialogical terms (as an object attained through rational dialogue) to interpreting it through a more complex and conflictual model of social action. It also draws on organizing to develop an account of how specific practices cultivate political virtues in individuals and institutions. Engaging with a variety of classic and contemporary theologians, organizers, and scholars of organizing, Nicholas’s research is also informed by his own experience in faith-based community organizing, through which he remains involved as a leader in the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO).

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Jared Highlen
Philosophy

Jared Highlen is a second year Ph.D. student in the Philosophy Department at Boston College, where his research focuses on hermeneutics and phenomenology. He received his B.A. in History and Philosophy at Wheaton College before completing an M.A. in Philosophy at Boston College. In addition to his teaching duties and research, Jared organizes the annual Northeastern Philosophy of Religion Colloquium (NEPRC) and serves on the advisory board of the Guestbook Project.

His current project brings together various thinkers in the phenomenological tradition – Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Paul Ricoeur – in order to understand the nature and role of forgiveness as a political phenomenon. Expressions of gratuitous forgiveness in response to staggering violence or injustice often enter the public imagination as inspirational stories. And yet there remains a curious tension between the transformative power of forgiveness and the demands of political justice. Despite gestures toward the incorporation of forgiveness into our political institutions – pardons, clemency, sentence commutation, and the like – it remains the case that forgiveness appears to be fundamentally at odds with the political requirements of a liberal society. If it is good to forgive, is it also just?

These kinds of questions mirror some of the debates within phenomenology on the nature of forgiveness, where it is understood either as a quasi-impossible ethical demand or, on the contrary, as a necessary condition for a functioning political community. Jared’s research seeks to navigate these disparate perspectives and, giving sufficient phenomenological attention to the concept itself, better articulate the role that forgiveness comes to play in our democratic community.

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Alexey Khazanov
Economics

Alexey Khazanov is pursuing his PhD degree in Economics at Boston College. He graduated from Moscow State University with bachelor’s degree in economics, and received a master’s degree in the same subject from New Economic School — both in Moscow, Russia. Prior to joining the Boston College community, he spent two years working at policy institutions (the Central Bank of Russia and the IMF), as well as a research fellow at his alma mater.

Alexey is conducting research in the fields of Macroeconomics and International Finance focusing mostly on the issues related to sovereign and municipal debt markets. Namely, he considers the economic impact of governments’ borrowing policies on asset prices and economic dynamics. In one of his projects he demonstrates that the presence of the sovereign default risk allows investors to benefit from trading on the currency markets — just until the moment when the government actually defaults on its debt.

The incidents of sovereign defaults can tell a large part of modern world’s economic history. Considered previously a “curse” of developing economies, the possibility of sovereign default became a true test of the sustainability of the European Union in 2010s. Economists have developed a broad set of quantitative tools to address these issues and provide policy recommendations. However, the issue of local governments’ defaults — such as the one that happened in Detroit in 2013 — and its importance for the national economy have not been yet investigated in detail.

The part of dissertation Alexey is working on as a Clough Center fellow is devoted to the impact of local governments’ policies on national economy’s dynamics in the United States. As in many developed countries, the overall government spending in the US is mildly countercyclical.  However, what does happen at the municipal level? How do institutional constraints in spending and taxation affect the policies that local governments conduct? And, most importantly, how is it reflected in economic dynamics at local and country levels? Alexey addresses these questions in his project, working both with the municipal-level data, and with complex economic models.

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Elise Largesse
Sociology

Elise Largesse is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in the Sociology department at Boston College, focusing on the sociology of place and environmental sociology. She received her MA in Sociology at Boston College, and her BA in Comparative Science and Religion at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Elise’s research interests also include media discourse and visual culture, inequality, risk, community sociology, human and critical geography, the sociology of development, and research methods.

Elise’s MA thesis, “Anthropogenic Coverage Change: Emergent Vocabularies within the Boston Globe’s Climate Change Coverage,” addressed the diversifying representations of climate change in mass media by altering a method of text analysis typically used in the disciplines of computer and information science and not yet used in sociological studies. By analyzing 35 years (3,786 articles) of climate change coverage in the Boston Globe, she addressed the nature and framing of coverage as it changed over time. These findings, showing movement from ecological framing into technological, public health and economic/activist frames, were presented at the 2016 annual conferences of the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and at Boston College’s Big Data Research Day in 2016.

Her ongoing  dissertation work examines the relationships between place, community, environment and economy on Nantucket Island, MA, through a multi-method study involving ethnography, participant observation, document analysis and spatial analysis using GIS data. Interviews with year-round island residents from the first phase of research revealed sentiments of conflict regarding the actions required for long-term and short-term viability of the year-round community, due to the co-amplifying pressures of climate change and tourism. The second research phase, supported by the Clough Center, will engage with island property owners that primarily live elsewhere. Preliminary findings were presented at the annual conferences of the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2017, 2019 and 2020 (canceled due to COVID-19) as well as the annual conference of the Eastern Sociological Society in 2019 and 2020.

In addition to her research, Elise is passionate about teaching, and has taught Introductory Sociology and Introduction to Sociological Thinking for Healthcare Professions at Boston College. She redesigned and has been teaching the Environmental Justice course at Boston College from Fall 2019-Spring 2021. For this work, she was awarded the 2020 Donald J. White Excellence in Teaching Award.

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Alex Moskowitz
English

Alex Moskowitz is a doctoral candidate in the English Department. He holds an M.A. in English from Boston College and a B.A. in Literature from SUNY Purchase. He is interested in American literature through the nineteenth century, African American literature, political economy, radical democracy, and critical theory.

Alex’s research project takes as its starting point the notion that sensory perception was fundamental to how American writers imagined the relation between literature and political possibility in the nineteenth century. His dissertation, “American Imperception: Literary Form, Sensory Perception, and Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” argues that American writers of the nineteenth century were deeply interested in how literature and literary form could be mobilized as an extrasensory apparatus that would make legible what in his project he terms “structures of imperception”: how sensory perception is structured by the otherwise imperceptible influence of political economy. These structures of imperception show up across works in the nineteenth century, as writers investigate how otherwise physically and sensuously perceptible objects, events, and social realities nevertheless fail to register with and become cognizable to characters in the texts under consideration. By tracing such moments of imperception, Alex’s dissertation explores how—in a number of texts by Henry David Thoreau, Martin Delany, Herman Melville, David Walker, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—American writers saw literature as site of potential political and social change, where literary form could be used not only to chronicle how and why the world appears as it does, but also to begin the work of retraining the senses to become sensitive to that which the structures of imperception have made it impossible to perceive. Central to his project is the notion that American writers were interested in the possibility of a type of democracy beyond what can be contained within the liberal framework into which they have traditionally been read. Part of what his project seeks to do is to bring to the study of literary aesthetics a sense of political urgency: while the study of aesthetics in literary criticism has been thought to be markedly apolitical, Alex’s dissertation argues that a properly political understanding of literature requires an engagement with it primarily as an aesthetic object.

Alex’s work has appeared in American Literary History and in Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture & Politics. He also serves as Associate Editor of The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies.

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Hilary Ogonna Nwainya
Theology

Hilary Ogonna Nwainya is a doctoral student in the theology department of Boston College with a specialization in ethics. He has a background in communication, philosophy and theology in Nigeria and Ireland. His research interests revolve around the common good, African ethics, peacebuilding, environmental ethics, vulnerability, identity, systemic racism, implicit bias and the ethics of recognition. He has published works in the proceedings of the Catholic Theological Association of Nigeria (CATHAN). His most recent conference presentations include: “Twenty Five Years after the Genocide: Can Rwanda Embrace an Ethics of Recognition?” (Kigali-Rwanda, June 20-22, 2019), "Bias, Conversion and Recognition: Contextualizing Lonergan’s Theology of Conversion in Post–genocide Rwanda" (Marquette University, September 20-21, 2019), and “Improving Patients’ Access to Healthcare: From Implicit Bias to Impartial Treatment” (World Congress on Bioethics, Philadelphia, June 19-21, 2020). 

Hilary is delighted to join outstanding doctoral candidates in History, Philosophy, English, Economics, Theology, Sociology, Political Science and Law as a Clough Graduate Fellow for the year 2020/2021. His doctoral research focuses on re-modeling constitutional democracy in Africa using insights from the African palaver ethics. It seeks to address the critical question of whether or not constitutional democracy can flourish in Africa. It answers this question affirmatively and proposes the model of recognition practiced in traditional African palaver institution as an ethical framework for a homegrown constitutional democracy that could flourish in Africa. Essentially, his research aims to debunk the idea that democracy is alien to Africa by arguing that its purest form could be found in the African palaver prior to foreign influences on the continent. It, however, acknowledges the need for a homegrown model of constitutional democracy on the historical fact that various “inherited” democracies have not flourished in most African states. It, thus, proposes the ethics of recognition based on the African Palaver model as a way forward in this direction. 

Hilary’s ethics of recognition highlights the significance of recognition as a basic human need, rather than a favor that can be granted or withdrawn. It differentiates the need for recognition from the demand for recognition and the struggle for recognition in democratic societies. It argues that inherited models of democracy in Africa lack a practical model for addressing recognition as a genuine human need. It notes that, this lack escalates the need for recognition to the level of demand thereby causing tensions within democratic states. It further argues that, since recognition is not usually addressed as a need or tackled promptly at the level of demand, it usually degenerates into a struggle at which point most democratic institutions fail. Hilary’s research, therefore, insists that an ethical framework that approaches recognition as a genuine human need, in the spirit of ubuntu, is necessary for re-modeling, improving and sustaining a homegrown constitutional democracy that works in Africa. Hilary is also a Catholic priest, a chartered mediator and a learning technology consultant. He has interest in foreign languages, country music, travelling and watching detective movies.

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Jocelyn Rice
English

Jocelyn Rice is an English Ph.D. student at Boston College, where she studies twentieth-century American literature and culture with a focus on material culture and the built environment. She is interested in American culture during periods of social and political reform. In 2012, Jocelyn graduated from Bates College with a degree in American history, and in 2015, she received her master’s degree in English literature from Boston College.

Jocelyn’s research considers institutional change through the methodological insights of material culture studies. By examining the social history of college architecture, Jocelyn studies how campus design serves as historical evidence that can help us to understand higher education’s relationship to reform movements and institutional development. She is also interested in campuses' "consumption," or how they were used and understood by later generations of students, faculty, and the public. By examining how campus design and architecture was discussed, used, and transformed, she investigates how they relate to or deviate from the ideology of its creators and what this expresses about the shifting cultures of their institutions. Jocelyn’s mode of inquiry allows her to place detailed research and analysis within the broader context of material culture by reading an artifact’s style as evidence of a culture’s ideologies and values.

Jocelyn is the co-director of the English Graduate Conference and the English Pedagogy Seminar. She has taught literature core and first-year writing at Boston College. In the fall, she will teach an elective entitled “Imagining New England.” In addition, Jocelyn serves as a Proctor and First-Year Advisor at Harvard University.

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Priyanka Sarda
Economics

Priyanka Sarda is a Ph.D. student in Economics at Boston College specializing in development economics. She holds a BSc in Economics from Presidency University, Kolkata, India; an MSc in Economics from the University of College, London and an MSc in Management and Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. Prior to joining Boston College, she worked as a research assistant at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India.

Her research focuses on issues related to gender inequality, early life health and intra-household decision making in low income countries. In her doctoral research she aims to analyze different dimensions of socioeconomic inequality.

In her dissertation research, she sheds light on the sources and consequences of unequal treatment among children in the household to gauge their relative salience. She proposes a compelling structural model framework that combines insights from the theoretical literature on intrahousehold resource allocation and fetal origins literature. She investigates how parents respond to children’s initial birth endowments, and whether these responses come at the cost or to the benefit of other siblings. Furthermore, she attempts to calculate the degree to which parents have an aversion to inequality among their children.

In other co-authored research, she is a part of the team conducting large-scale randomized controlled trial in south India. The trial evaluates a program that provides subsidies to firms for training and placing rural women workers in formal sector jobs in urban areas. Using the randomized access to training and job placement opportunities induced by this trial, she aims to evaluate impacts of the program on three categories of outcomes: women’s social and economic wellbeing; resource and time investments in children; and child health and socioeconomic development. Additionally, she examines the social, structural, and economic processes that shape women’s bargaining power within these households. This research will provide timely relevant knowledge and help policymakers to accurately assess the costs and benefits of female employment-related interventions, as well as predict characteristics of successful rural to urban migration over the short and long run.

In another chapter of her doctoral thesis, she studies the political economy of health provisions. Specifically, she looks at the impact of gender-based quotas in village councils in India on individual and village-level health outcomes, with a focus on infant and maternal health.

To answer the different questions posed in these projects, she has embraced a variety of techniques- ranging from estimation of rigorous econometric models, developing theoretical models, and supervising primary data collection exercises. As a social scientist, she aims to pursue research that can help answer policy relevant questions and bring objective evidence into discussions.

Priyanka is also the recipient of several awards: Dissertation Fellowship Award (2018), the Donald White Teaching Award (2019,2018) and the Dean of Summer Session Teaching Fellowship, Boston College (2019) given for excellence in teaching. She is also co-PI on a grant awarded by the IPA Intimate Partner Violence Initiative (2019).

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Isaiah Sterrett
History

Isaiah Sterrett is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department of Boston College, where he concentrates on the cultural, intellectual, and political history of the United States. Of particular interest to him is the nexus between public affairs and private life. In his present research, Isaiah deals with one of the crucial conflicts of nineteenth-century American culture. Soon after the Revolution, young New Englanders began leaving their homes—sometimes for the city, sometimes for the burgeoning West—as never before. On the one hand, in leaving their homes and forging their own paths, young Northerners helped build a nation, fulfilling their own aspirations and, in many cases, those of their forbears. On the other, however, contemporaries continued to regard the home as the central training ground for balanced, patriotic, upstanding men and women. How, many wondered, would such virtues be transmitted from one generation to the next if not by parents in the home? Who, if not mothers and fathers, would stand between young people and the many perils of the world? These and similar questions are starting points of Isaiah’s culminating doctoral project, which spans the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods and is based upon childrearing texts, popular periodicals, as well as contemporary fiction.

Isaiah Sterrett holds a B.A. (2010), cum laude, and an M.A. (2012) in Political Science, both from Boston College. The 2020-2021 academic year will mark his third consecutive year as a Clough Graduate Fellow.

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Will Stratford
History

Will Stratford is a Ph.D. candidate in modern European history in his second year at Boston college. After receiving his B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy at Davidson College, he worked in Chicago for five years as a high school tutor for the University of Chicago Urban Education Lab, a library assistant for the University of Chicago Library, a volunteer projectionist for the Doc Films cinema, and a bartender. During the 2018/2019 academic year, he taught middle school English for the JET Program in Japan.

In his first year at Boston College, Will spearheaded the introduction of several critical dialogues to BC’s campus. As a member of the Platypus Affiliated Society and a former copy-editor for the Platypus Review, Will began the process of founding Platypus BC as a new student organization at Boston College. Along with its weekly reading group on the history of the Left that he led, Platypus BC hosted its first on-campus public forum, Freedom in the Anthropocene, in February 2020. The panel he organized and mediated included representatives of the DSA, the Green Party, Platypus, and the BC graduate student body. Starting in the 2020/2021 academic year, Will will serve as a teaching assistant for courses on early modern European history and modern global intellectual history.

Will’s main interests concern the history of ideas in the modern era, especially radical political thought and social theory in Europe and America and its concomitant labor history. In his first year at BC, he wrote a research paper on Victor Berger, America’s first Socialist congressman, which has recently been submitted for publication. The paper, “A ‘Student of History’: The Marxism of Victor Berger in the Heyday of American Socialism,” aims to recover the lost history of socialist thought from the obscuring lenses of Progressivism, Populism, anarchism, scientism, and official Communism. As he argues, recent talk of a Second Gilded Age today overlooks the vastly different roles “socialism” played in the contemporary dialogues: in the first Gilded Age, Marxist theory linked the formation of massive socialist parties like the Socialist Party of America to a totalizing philosophy of history and international political change. Rather than fighting for a stronger welfare state like socialists today, even the most conservative Socialists like Wisconsin Representative Victor Berger remarkably campaigned for the abolition of wage labor and the complete overthrow of capitalism.

Will’s current research addresses a little-studied movement in contemporary history, the Antideutsche (anti-Germans), a far-Left political current that emerged during German reunification in 1990. Though it never formed a mass political organization of its own, Antideutsche thought developed into an influential critical tendency on the far Left in German-speaking Europe. As virtually no English scholarship exists on the Antideutsche, Will seeks to make a significant contribution to English-language contemporary intellectual and political history by analyzing and contextualizing this significant new movement. His research looks to intersect three major interdisciplinary conversations: disruptions of familiar left–right political distinctions, revisions of late twentieth-century historical periodization, and reformulations of the power of ideology in politics.