Grant Recipients

Lilah Butler

Lilah is a rising senior in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences studying International Studies and English with a minor in French. Originally from Oregon, she spent her spring semester junior year abroad at Sciences Po, a political science institute in Paris. On campus, she is a member of 4Boston, working with the students of Mattapan Early Elementary School in an afterschool program one day a week. She is involved as well on the e-board of Al Noor, the Middle Eastern Studies Journal, which allowed her to attend the Middle Eastern Studies Association conference for the past two years. Last summer and during the school year Lilah worked as an Undergraduate Research Fellow in the political science department, focusing on political theory and Islamic political philosophy. She belongs to the John Marshall Project Fellowship, an initiative of the political science department which seeks to promote active citizenship and statesmanship through discussion of the nuances of our American democratic and constitutional republic.  

This summer, Lilah will be working in the American Embassy in the Hague, the Netherlands. She is excited to explore the career field of diplomacy and assist in planning and producing events linking the Dutch and American publics. As an intern with the public affairs department she will be working on everything from speech writing to photography and social media posting. The Embassy hosts a variety of events, including educational forums for high school students and speakers such as diplomats and professionals from STEM, government and public policy, and the humanities.  Interning in the Hague will also provide the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of NGOs and international bodies such as the International Criminal Court and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Interning with the State Department will help Lilah determine whether she wants to work in diplomacy or another aspect of international relations after graduation.

---

Minaldy Cadet

Minaldy Cadet is a rising Senior in the Morrissey College of Arts and Science from Fort Lauderdale, FL. He double majors in Political Science and Psychology B.A. At BC, Minaldy serves as Big Brother in the BC Bigs program, a Resident Assistant in the sophomore housing community, and a member of the executive board for the Haitian Association culture club. Minaldy co-founded Boston College Active Minds, a mental health club that seeks to spread mental health awareness while fostering a safe space for open-ended discussions on mental health on college campuses.

This Summer, Minaldy will be working as an intern at the office of Catholic Legal Immigration Network. INC (CLINIC) in Silver Springs, MD. The office provides a multitude of programs and network that serve immigrants. Some of the network includes faith-based institutions, farmworker programs, domestic violence shelters, ethnic community-focused organizations, libraries, and other entities. CLINIC tackles problems faced by low-income immigrants and resolved through advocacy, education, pro bono representation, litigation, and media. As an intern, Minaldy will be placed in the communications department. Minaldy will be working on a variety tasks, including, but not limited to: assisting the webmaster with CLINIC’s new website, doing some back-end maintenance on the database, and helping with anticipated public outreach on a variety of immigration-related topics, including Temporary Protected Status and changes in policies about financial obligations related to immigration status.

Minaldy has dedicated his Boston College career to understanding the ever-changing immigration system in the United States. Through his course work and personal experience. Minaldy sees an unfair restriction placed upon children who emigrated to the United States and have remained and completed High School but have yet to hold any permanent residence status. Despite completing most, if not all, of their schooling in America and are American in every way, they are treated as international students should they want to pursue higher education and are not eligible for federal financial aid. The immigration system is complex and low-income immigrants are often the most vulnerable group. Minaldy aims to dedicate his career to serving those low-income immigrants as they are often left without proper guidance and voiceless. He is thrilled to have the opportunity to explore the complexities of immigration further. After college, Minaldy wants to continue his studies by attending law school.

---

Leo Confalone

I am a junior in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences majoring in Political Science with a minor in Philosophy.

I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. After attending DC Public Schools for most of my life, I enrolled at St. John’s College High School to participate in the De La Salle Scholars Program. I currently live in D.C. along with my family and our three dogs.

From a young age, my parents instilled in me the value of working to make a difference in the lives of others. Growing up in the nation’s capital helped me to develop an appreciation for public service and fostered my aspirations to pursue a career in government. The District has also exposed me to the stark inequalities that exist across our country, even in our government’s backyard, and inspired my passion to seek justice in my professional career.

Throughout my life, I have been fortunate to have opportunities to travel and expand my worldview while developing my interest in international affairs. I spent the summer after my freshman year in Amman, Jordan studying Arabic at the Qasid Institute. I am studying as a Visiting Student at Mansfield College at the University of Oxford for the 2018-2019 academic year.

In the past, I have worked as an intern for Senator Edward J. Markey and Congressman Seth Moulton, both of Massachusetts. At Boston College, I have served as the Vice President of the College Democrats, Opinions Editor of The Heights, and as a Trip Leader in the Appalachia Volunteers Program.

This summer, I will serve as an intern with the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. In my role, I will provide members of the Majority Staff with policy and administrative support. I will engage in policy research, attend briefings and hearings, and draft memoranda and written materials related to foreign policy and international affairs. I hope to develop a greater understanding of the legislative branch’s role in formulating foreign policy and to learn more about how the United States can promote human rights, freedom, and democracy around the globe.

In the future, I plan to work in the field of diplomacy and international affairs through a career in public service. I believe that the United States should contribute to creating a world that ensures fundamental rights and opportunity for all people. Drawing upon my education and experiences, I hope to one day contribute to this mission.

---

Kyle Costa

This coming fall, I will be entering my fourth year at Boston College. I am a double major in both Political Science and Islamic Civilization and Societies. I am originally from Cincinnati, Ohio. This is where I grew up and lived before making the decision to study in Boston. My decision to start studying Arabic my freshman year has led me on an incredible academic journey that has taken me to two different countries in the Middle East, Lebanon and Jordan. Last summer, I studied in an intensive, Arabic program at the American University of Beirut. This past spring semester, I studied Arabic for four months in Amman, Jordan. Both of these experiences have led me to pursue working with Syrian elementary school students through a non-profit called “al-Jusoor” (“the bridges”) this coming summer.

I was first introduced to this NGO while studying at AUB last summer. I was paired as a language exchange partner with a Syrian man named Noor. During one of my program’s excursions, we visited one of the primary schools in the Bekaa Valley and spent the day with the students there. I had such a great experience that day, I wanted to see how else I could get involved with al-Jusoor.

During the formal school year, Jusoor’s primary goal is to provide remedial primary education so that these students can enter the formal Lebanese public schools and succeed there. The Summer Volunteer Program provides a ‘summer camp’ experience that constitutes a key opportunity these children have to participate in extracurricular activities. 

At the centers, the volunteers will run activities for five days a week for a period of 3 weeks, and each will be paired with an Arabic-speaking Syrian or Lebanese teacher or volunteer. 

During the course of the program, the volunteers will run activities within the classrooms in collaboration with their Arabic-speaking co-facilitators and the larger Jusoor team in Lebanon. Volunteers are also asked to write blog posts about their experience on a regular basis, which will then be shared with the larger Jusoor community.

I know that this program will be an important experience for me as I navigate my way towards achieving my future goals. Besides being an excellent way to retain the colloquial Arabic skills I learned in Amman this past spring semester, al-Jusoor’s summer program will constitute my first experience working in emergency education. This is something I have considered pursuing in the future. For my last year at Boston College, I am planning on applying to a few competitive, national scholarships that would allow me to pursue  my interests related to Arabic. For this reason, al-Jusoor’s summer program will provide me with a critical, learning experience that will shape how I approach my goals related to graduate school and research after my undergraduate years.  

---

John DiBello

I was raised on the north shore of Massachusetts and currently reside there with my parents. As a rising senior at Boston College, I study Biology on the pre-medical track and have an interest in public health and the application of humanities to health and health care. Past and current experiences on campus include: BC Marching Band, Appalachia Volunteers, Liturgy Arts Group, and Arrupe Immersion Program. Off campus, I have worked as an intern at sites including Boston Health Care for the Homeless, Action for Boston Community Development, and Newton Wellesley Hospital.  I spent my past semester living in Quito, Ecuador where I undertook a full course load in Spanish and completed initial investigative work alongside Dr. Iván Palacios, the Director of Global Health at Universidad de San Francisco de Quito Medical School.  I dedicated significant time to the research component of my experience, splitting time between the medical school and the rural town of Pifo, which lies an hour drive outside of the city.

The grant will fund my role as a research and program development intern at USFQ Medical School for six weeks. I will be working full-time under Dr. Palacios to complete data collection and to process data from our two current investigations. The first study focuses on the physical, mental, and social health of the elderly population – defined as 65 years or older – in the town of Pifo. The second study gives focus to the socialization of adult male population of Pifo as well as of three other public health clinic sites: Tumbaco, El Quinche, and Puembo.  Beyond finalizing these reports, I will have three other focuses.  First, I will develop a protocol for a new public health investigation entitled: “Adolescent Male Attitudes Towards Sexual and Reproductive Health.”  We hope to address this often unrecognized population in regards to sexual education and responsibility.  Second, working alongside a visiting medical student, we will assist persons experiencing disability/handicap in the specific community of Checa with an emphasis on affordable solutions and support for caregivers. In addition, we will develop disability-focused, public policy advocacy efforts that could continue through the university and its students.  The final objective is to introduce a pilot program that promotes intergenerational interaction in the community of Lumbisi. Adolescents would be instructed in a variety of enjoyable and healthy practices that they would then share with the local elderly population through a weekly club.

My work will address a variety of interests which will inform my future career. I, as well as Dr. Palacios, believe in the power of community engagement in the pursuit of healthier communities. I plan to pursue a degree in medicine after college, and I recognize the power of social and political conditions as determinants of well-being. My future career considerations include community, geriatric, and women’s health focuses, and my work this summer will allow me to explore each of these themes.

---

Zoe Fanning

Zoe is a rising senior in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences majoring in International Studies and minoring in Public Health and the Common Good while on a pre-medical track. She is originally from Portland, Oregon and attended Jesuit High School. At Boston College, she is the Education Chair for the club MEDLIFE, which raises awareness of and advocates for issues relating to global health. She works as an undergraduate research fellow for Professor Jennifer Erickson of BC’s Political Science Department on topics relating to human rights violations and sanctioning, which has played a large role in helping to spur her interest in global conflict and resultant health outcomes. Zoe also serves as a research assistant at the Parkinson Center of Oregon at Oregon Health and Sciences University, where she has been working on a project with their Deep Brain Stimulation treatment. Zoe loves to run, ski, and climb, and loves to spend time with her family and dog, Wallace.

This summer, Zoe will be conducting research in Geneva, Switzerland regarding the effects of armed conflict on civilian health. The international community plays a central role in shaping the treatment of civilians during conflict. In recent cases like Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Yemen, it is clear that essential civilian services like health care have been caught in the crossfire (and in some cases deliberately targeted), making it very difficult for individuals to receive treatment for ongoing conditions or for injuries or diseases sustained from the conflict itself. While the international community and governments themselves have in some cases sought to remedy health care crises in war, how interventions are initiated and what makes their efforts successful, inadequate, or even harmful are not well known. In Switzerland, Zoe will be meeting with leaders and professionals from many international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and universities with the goal of identifying how and why the international community pursues health intervention during conflict and the conditions that result in success or failure.

After graduation, Zoe plans to pursue an MD and an MPH, in order to incorporate these issues into her career as a physician as imperative to adequate health care provision and global equity. Quite simply, without understanding the role of the international community in civilian access to health during war, we will not be able to sustainably improve human security and human rights.

After graduation, Elizabeth will pursue a Masters in Education to begin teaching in public schools across the country. She intends on establishing a teaching career and then pursuing further education in Higher Education or Curriculum Development. She ultimately wants to become involved with policy advocacy. Elizabeth desires to transform the current climate of public education within the country to provide a more equitable education for all students.

---

Anne Marie Green

My name is Anne Marie Green, and I am a rising senior from Baltimore, Maryland. I major in Political Science and minor in Environmental Studies. I intend to pursue a career in environmental policy, and while I am interested in many environmental issues, my specific interests are in plastics and waste management. To explore these areas more in depth, I am writing a Political Science senior honors thesis related to waste policy in the United States and the future of our recycling system. I also work with issues related to waste as the Student Sustainability Intern Manager at BC Dining Sustainability Services. At BC Dining, I have the privilege of working with management, chefs, and student environmental organizations on projects including waste reduction and education campaigns, the Green2Go reusable container program, and the FRESH to Table food sustainability initiative. Last summer, I interned with the Sierra Club Massachusetts Chapter, assisting with advocacy projects, political blogging, and Electric Vehicle campaigns. This past spring, I studied abroad in Christchurch, New Zealand. In addition to spending many weekends camping in the gorgeous New Zealand outdoors, I did an Environmental Systems field camp with Frontiers abroad, and wrote a research manuscript comparing nitrate contamination in groundwater from dairy agriculture in California and New Zealand. In my free time, I enjoy being a member of the BC Women’s Club Squash team, playing the guitar, writing music and practicing photography.

This summer, I am thrilled to work at the City of Boston’s Environment Department, helping with projects to implement the Zero Waste Boston initiative. The initiative was announced last year with the goal of achieving 80% waste diversion from landfills by 2030. My work this summer will include researching the currently fragmented waste policies in the city, so that these can be harmonized into a single city-wide waste ordinance. I will be working with city officials, industry experts and stakeholders to help Boston get on track for zero waste. Proper waste management is critical to maintaining a clean, healthy and equitable society, and I am thrilled to serve the people of Boston in this way. I am so grateful for the Clough Center’s support in my internship this summer, giving me the opportunity not only to improve the Boston community but also to advance my career in environmental work.

---

Gabriella Haedelt

Gabriella Haedelt is a rising junior at Boston College from Naples, Florida who is studying Political Science and International Studies. Gabriella is a research assistant for Professor Peter Krause on the Project of National Movements and Political Violence, where she conducts research on the Middle East and political violence while using skills in archival work and content analysis. Gabriella is also a Copy Editor for Kaleidoscope International Journal and the Editor-In-Chief of Fresh Ink Literary Magazine. She was a Policy Analyst on the BC Policy Council as a first-year student and won the Boston College Public Policy Case Competition in 2018. She is a member of EagleMUNC and enjoys developing the Model UN conference hosted for high school students every year in downtown Boston. Gabriella’s interest in public service and law began with two internships at the Legal Aid Service of Collier County in her hometown, where she worked for lawyers specializing in immigration, domestic violence, and other areas of public service.

This summer Gabriella will be a Legislative Intern for Congressman Ben Ray Luján at the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington D.C. While interning on Capitol Hill, Gabriella will be tasked with legislative and administrative responsibilities, including communicating with constituents, conducting policy research, and assisting House staffers with drafting documents on legislation. She will gain an understanding of American Politics and the ways in which our government operates. Concurrently, Gabriella will be conducting independent research on the ways Presidential executive orders condition U.S. energy policy. Gabriella hopes her research will lead to a Senior Thesis on this topic or something similar.

Gabriella’s areas of academic interest are Political Economy, International Relations, and Comparative Politics. She hopes this summer on Capitol Hill will be a springboard to more opportunity for policy work in Washington D.C. once graduated from college. After Boston College, Gabriella plans to attend law school and specialize in International Law and Foreign Policy. She plans to become a U.S. Attorney and later work at the U.S. Department of State.

---

Ellana Lawrence

“Ellana, stop asking me! I already said no” is the line my mother would often say to me as a child. As I look back, I have come to realize that phrase was a reflection of my persistent, impatient, and curious nature. If I had my heart set on something, I was going to find a way to attain it. These traits followed me to high school, where I became more active and interested in social justice. My passion for activism started in 2014 when the student body president at my high school decided to have a walkout in protest of the murders of young blacks by police officers. As a school, we protested in the streets of Manhattan, chanting and yelling “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” I was overwhelmed with contradictory feelings of rage and joy, emptiness and empowerment, unity and loneliness. I felt excited because I was finally taking a stance, but angry because of the daily injustices that young black and brown people face. This was one of the greatest experiences of my life, as it launched me into my activism work. I became more focused on social justice and making a difference in my school community. Since the walkout, I have been selected to attend diversity conferences, ran workshops on race and class, organized assemblies regarding #BlackLivesMatter and mass incarceration, completed many independent projects, including my film entitled Unfound Justice, and received the Princeton Prize in Race Relations Award.

During this time, I also developed a deep love for technology because I was interested in how it works, the effects it has on society, and its role in social movements. After participating in Girls Who Code and the Computer Science Summer Institute at Google in New York City, I decided to major in Information Systems at Boston College. I also decided to minor in Applied Psychology & Human Development, as I knew this would provide a larger context for the activist work that I am doing. Ensuring that I stay focused on giving back while also learning more about the tech industry, I decided to apply to Diive, a program based in Cape Town, South Africa that selects approximately 15 students from around the world to intern for four weeks at tech companies that use data science and blockchain technology to solve various sustainability issues. I was accepted in May and I am now in the process of ranking my top three internship choices, as well as preparing for my trip to Cape Town. I truly could not be more thankful for this opportunity.

In the future, I would like to start an organization that assists low-income POC students with being admitted into higher education schools through providing them with financial help and mentorship. I would also like to continue making films, as I did in high school, that shed light on injustices that are often overlooked, or films that create new narratives within the black community. I firmly believe that media portrayal plays a large role in our biases, so it is imperative that we eradicate stereotypes in hopes to tell accurate and more positive stories. I hope to give back to all of the people who have helped me along the way and ultimately use my voice to expose instances of inequality, as well as create a space for black young women, like myself, to take a stand.

---

Megi Maci

Megi Maci is a rising senior in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences majoring in Biology with a Medical Humanities minor on the pre-medical track. She was born in Tirana, Albania and moved to Quincy, MA in 2001. Megi is an undergraduate research fellow for BC’s biology department, and she is the new co-president of GlobeMed, a non-profit grassroots organization that works to augment communication between university chapters and overseas partnerships to break down systematic barriers to healthcare. As a junior, Megi served as a Resident Assistant to 32 young women and a Women in STEM mentor to five underclassmen, where she has helped shape these women’s personal and career development during one of the most formative years of their lives. She is also an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) for Boston College EMS, a Leadershape alumna, and a member of Full Swing.

This summer, Megi will be traveling to Tamil Nadu, India to work with the Chinmaya Organization for Rural Development (CORD) in Siruvani, one of the poorest regions in Tamil Nadu. There, she will work alongside CORD director Dr. Meera and community development workers as equitable partners in effecting long-term, sustainable change through public health initiatives. These include waste segregation, female empowerment, a holistic approach to addiction therapy, sanitation, and health promotion. Megi will work in the field to both educate and empower females and children to promote their self-governance and health education for optimistic health outcomes. These education groups fuel Dr. Meera’s clinic by increasing vaccination uptake. Finally, Megi will work with CORD to further their holistic approach to treating patients. Her ultimate goal is to increase intercultural communication between high and low-and-middle income countries in order to optimize patient health outcomes. After she leaves India, Megi will help create a partnership action framework in collaboration with CORD to outline the analyses of current public health initiatives, the benefits, and their effectiveness. The trusted partnership between her and CORD Siruvani ensures that they are continuously working together to further these initiatives for the amelioration of impoverished populations and to eliminate injurious social injustices.

Megi’s post-graduation plans are to attend medical school and to use her BC education, which has seamlessly interwoven her dual passions for medicine and public health, for the common good. Since coming to BC, her dream of becoming a doctor has been fortified by the Jesuit mission of being a woman for others, her Albanian identity, and her love of medicine. Megi is forever grateful to the Clough Center for giving her the means to continue pursuing her dream.

---

Joseph McGrane

My name is Joseph McGrane and I am a rising sophomore studying Political Science and Economics in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences. I was born and raised in Bloomington Minnesota and have chosen to venture out to Boston College to challenge myself academically, socially, and professionally. At BC I am apart of the Emerging Leaders Program, Arrupe
International Immersion Program, 4Boston, and I work in the equipment room in Conte Forum. Some of my interests stemming from my prospective majors and commitments on campus include American politics, nonprofit work, servant leadership, public policy, history, and english. I also am an avid Minnesota sports fan who enjoys playing basketball, soccer, and tennis.

As an intern this summer for the Minnesota Governor’s office in the office Public Engagement, I will be representing Governor Walz and his administration by handling correspondence and helping the state of Minnesota feel more connected, informed, and valued by their government. I will also be given the opportunity to work alongside several state agencies in their efforts to resolve conflicts and concerns brought up by the members of our constituency. Other duties I will perform include helping run public events and outreach around the state. As an intern for the office of Public Engagement, I believe I will gain unique insight on the inner workings of government affairs while simultaneously helping my state reach its fullest potential. By reading and responding to correspondence from constituents of Minnesota like myself, I will be able to give these people the time and attention they deserve as members of a democracy and help amplify their voices and concerns to my state government.

I am in the midst of a deepening process of discernment to determine my future career plans. It is my hope that my internship experience as well as my involvement in the Junior Fellows program will help guide me in this time of questioning and uncertainty. As of this moment, I am interested in working as a public servant for a local or state government or as a part of a nonprofit organization that helps solve certain societal issues in our country such as poverty and economic inequality. I believe that both of these roles require a commitment to service, leadership, and intellectual study in order to be best fulfilled. I am honored to be appointed a Junior Fellow and to receive a Civic Internship Grant for this upcoming academic year and I am certain that my involvement in this program will further my discernment process in many unrivaled ways.

---

Mahima Menghani

Mahima Menghani is a rising junior 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 is an undergraduate research fellow for Professor Peter Krause in the Political Science Department. Through her position, she researches historical armed insurgencies, conducts data analysis, and contributes to political science publications. She has also received an Advanced Study Grant for a summer project titled “The Evolution of Geriatric Care in an Industrialized India,” which will explore the sociopolitical consequences of economic development and its impact on the growing demand for a nursing home system in India. Additionally, she is involved in the South Asian Student Association at Boston College and participated in its annual spring Culture Show.

This summer, Mahima will intern with the United States Attorney’s Office of Boston, Massachusetts in the Securities & Financial Fraud Unit (SFF) of the criminal division.  The United States Attorney is a nonpartisan federal law enforcement agency, overseen by the Department of Justice, that is responsible for prosecuting a broad range of crimes that violate federal law. The intention of the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices is not to win every case brought to the table, but rather to exercise justice and to fight for the betterment of the country despite representing the United States as a prosecuting party. The SFF Unit targets perpetrators of white-collar crimes that include tax evasion, fraud, embezzlement, and market manipulation. There, Mahima will assist in the prosecution of economic crimes, aiding Assistant U.S. Attorneys in organizing the case files of businesses and in facilitating legal proceedings. Her responsibilities will involve conducting document reviews, observing courtroom arguments, performing analytical work, and preparing pretrial materials.

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 U.S. Attorney’s Office provides her with the perfect opportunity to gain exposure to the federal criminal justice system while delving deeper into the judicial process for attaining restitution for taxpayers and victims of financial crimes. She looks forward to serving as a Clough Center Junior Fellow next year and continuing to define her career path.

---

Ingrid Miranda-Paratore

Ingrid Miranda-Paratore is a rising senior in Boston College’s Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences. She is a double major in Economics and International Studies. This past fall semester, she studied abroad in Venice, Italy under the Globalization Program at Venice International University. During her time abroad, she studied how warfare, political instability, and economic turmoil have plagued various parts of the world, specifically the Middle East and Venezuela. In analyzing such issues, she has come to understand the effects they have on international business and trade in both the private and public sectors. Outside of the classroom, Ingrid has pursued her interests in global affairs by assisting Professor Peter J. Krause as a research assistant for his Project on National Movements and Political Violence. As a research assistant, Ingrid edited and reviewed publications as well as provided critical analysis of case studies for future publications.

This summer Ingrid will be interning for the U.S. Department of Commerce in their U.S. Commercial Service Sector, which is the trade promotion sector of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration. As an International Trade intern, Ingrid will be involved in projects pertaining to international market research, marketing, and international business counseling. She will also be involved in promoting overseas trade shows, export leads, seminars, and other trade activities to U.S. exporters and partners. Some other responsibilities will be directing inquiries from U.S. exporters regarding trade requirements, regulations, documentation, international marketing strategies, and commodity classification. Additionally, she will attend meetings with local businesses to assess export needs and present her international market research findings to the clients.

Ingrid is very thankful for her BC experience as it has been an instance of learning superimposed on living: the words in her textbooks and from her professors have spread beyond the classroom and she has found their relevance in the everyday. These connections have challenged her to expand her worldview in unexpected ways, which in turn have shaped her values and future goals. Going into her senior year, Ingrid is committed to building a career that directly impacts communities. Whether through a focus on post-conflict crisis and international development through NGOs or work with corporate firms to improve their social responsibility roles, she aspires to apply her knowledge and skill set to improving the world we live in.

---

Cosette Newcomb

This summer I will be working as an intern for the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology. With this I will be looking at ways to improve interaction between Boston residents and their local government online and in person through the use of digital technology. I sought to work with the City of Boston as I am from Boston myself and I believe effective change is made by people who are informed and engaged with their government on every level. I was drawn to an internship in the Department of Innovation and Technology specifically as I am a computer science and sociology double major with a passion for social justice. I think knowing how groups function and interact directly correlates with digital technology in this case. By working with the City this summer I will help strengthen a digital platform that facilitates and offers new ways for residents to contact and be involved with the City of Boston. A strong digital platform provides residents better access their government officials, as well as, City sponsored programs and resources. Digital access to one’s government also gives people the materials to have a stronger role in their government in which they feel they can vocalize needed change.

Today the world is incredibly technology oriented and the United States Government, at local and national levels need to be accessible in order to represent and serve all of its people. For this to happen the two need to be in contact, thus our government should be looking to incorporate technology in helpful ways that facilitate and encourage people to be involved and informed citizens which is what my internship this summer will be doing. After this summer I plan to continue to work with non-profit organizations in my future and employ the skills I have learned through my computer science and sociology majors.

---

Sophia Pandelidis

My name is Sophia Pandelidis, and I am a rising junior in the International Studies department. I am incredibly honored to have the opportunity to intern for the Council for Court Excellence in Washington, DC this summer, thanks to the generous assistance of the Clough Center. CCE is a non-profit, non-partisan organization working towards justice reform in DC area. CCE prides itself in being committed to systemically improving the justice system, promoting equality, and ensuring liberty. As a policy intern, I hope to get an inside look at CCE’s various areas of expertise in Civil, Criminal, and Youth Justice as well as Justice Education. Two of my general responsibilities will be primary and secondary research of the local and federal justice system as well as the development of legislation. Interns at CCE are also responsible for creating public education guides that increase the public’s understanding of the civil, criminal, and juvenile justice systems.

My interest in the justice system began last summer, when I read the poignant book, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, which focuses on death row in Alabama. The egregious injustices and appalling racial inequality that exists in the “justice system” were both shocking and devastating to me. However, Stevenson and his team were the most inspiring parts of the book, for they persevered in the face of repeated failure and refused to give up their belief in human dignity. This is what made me realize that working in justice reform may be something I want to pursue. I will have the opportunity to engage with the experts at CCE, which will allow me to learn more about career advancement in the field. I hope to explore pathways to both law and non-profit management over the summer—inspiration is key!

Outside the classroom, I love singing, playing guitar, dancing, and hiking around my native New England. At Boston College, I am part of the Acoustics, an a cappella group, and I am a leader in the International Assistants program. Thank you again to the Clough Center for making this summer possible!

---

Charlie Power

Charlie Power is a rising junior in the Carroll School of Management, concentrating in Economics and minoring in Theology. He is a member the Carroll School of Management Honors Program. On campus, he is a part of the Student Organization Funding Committee, a group of students that oversees the budgeting process of over 200 on-campus student organizations, and also works as an undergraduate research fellow in the Theology department.

This summer, Charlie will be interning with La Chispa in Mexico City. As an NGO, one of La Chispa’s core concerns is a focus on social entrepreneurship. In other words, La Chispa not only seeks business success as it has been conventionally measured, but the organization also wants to certify that the entrepreneurs it works with have a clear and articulable mission about how their product or service betters their community. La Chispa accomplishes these goals by functioning as a startup accelerator--taking in new businesses, training, mentoring, and working with founders. La Chispa offers expertise--whether financial, strategic, or marketing--and believes that members of local communities are best empowered through owning and running their own businesses, spreading economic opportunity and building more cohesive communities.

In eight weeks at La Chispa, Charlie will be working on three main objectives. The first is to increase the quantity and quality of social impact entrepreneurs applying to La Chispa’s training programs. Further, he will help train La Chispa’s newest recruited entrepreneurs. While these businessmen and women have proposals and new ideas that La Chispa believes have the potential to positively impact local neighborhoods in Mexico City, these entrepreneurs need advice on how to go from ideation to actualization, from planning to execution. Charlie, along with La Chispa staff, will be running entrepreneurship boot camps designed to fast-track this process. Finally, he will be working with La Chispa’s entrepreneurs who have already been trained by the organization, which on a day to day level will consist of advising them on strategic matters: how to grow their businesses, evaluating their current market, and customer acquisition strategies.

During his next two years at BC, he is interested in attempting to practice more discernment with regards to careers after college. At this point, possible interests going into consulting or applying to law school. 

---

Lauren Rabbottini

I am Lauren Rabbottini, a rising sophomore at Boston College. Currently, I am majoring in Biology and minoring in Global Public Health for the Common Good. This summer I spent approximately 3 weeks interning with CORD Siruvani in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. CORD stands for the Chinmaya Organization for Rural Development and is a grassroots non-profit organization that works to create sustainable and holistic public health initiatives that attack the root causes of health disparities in rural communities. During my internship, I observed how CORD addresses and helps solve various health related issues in the community. I spent the majority of my time working with Doctor Meera who is our contact at CORD. With Doctor Meera, our team evaluated current public health initiative and investigated unaddressed health issues present in the community. One of the larger initiatives I attended were the weekly Mahila Mandals, which are female empowerment groups for the community. These meetings not only helped provide CORD with information on the health of the women and the impact of their current initiatives in the community but also acted as a support system and a resource that provides concrete strategies and services. Mahila Mandals represent just part of the work that CORD does to improve the overall wellbeing of the community, as various initiatives focused on addressing communicable diseases in the population, on providing resources to improve access to sustainable sources of income, etc. In the future, I plan on using my knowledge of working with communities to create and implement sustainable and comprehensive public health initiatives. I hope to work in the field of Global Public Health where I will investigate outbreaks and health problems at the community level and will work with community leaders and public health officials to establish policies to help eradicate disease and health disparities. This work will hopefully be coupled with my own research in the fields of biology and global health, where I plan on investigating infectious diseases and the health of vulnerable populations. Ultimately, I aspire to combine my formal education and scientific background with my real work experiences to investigate and understand the effects of social determinants on the health of populations and work to diminish their presence and effects.

---

Harry Shanmugam

Harry Shanmugam is a rising junior from Hopkinton, MA in the Carroll School of Management, concentrating in Accounting for Finance and Consulting and pursuing a double major in Biology on the pre-medical track. He is a member of the Gabelli Presidential Scholars Program.

At BC, Harry serves as Vice President of Boston College’s travelling Model United Nations team, and is on the executive board of GlobeMed, a public health advocacy group, and the Fulton Leadership Society, a leadership development organization for CSOM students. He is a panelist for the Student Admissions program and is involved in Consult Your Community, an organization which provides pro-bono consulting services to Boston-area startups. Harry is an undergraduate research fellow under Professor Summer Hawkins, conducting research on the effects of prescription drug policy on adolescent drug use, and a member of Dr. Philip Landrigan’s research team studying the effects of ocean pollution on human health. Last summer, Harry worked in Tamil Nadu, India as an intern at the Chinmaya Organization for Rehabilitation and Development, a grassroots public health and rural development non-profit organization. Harry serves on the Boston Ryan White Part A Planning Council, responsible for allocating federal funds to HIV/AIDS service agencies in the Greater Boston area.

This summer, Harry will be at the National Institute of Public Health (Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública, INSP) as a visiting student researcher. The INSP serves as the primary apparatus of public health research for the Mexican government, and its publications and findings often constitute the basis and impetus for much of Mexican health policy. Harry will be working under the supervision of Dr. Lizbeth

López-Carrillo to study the carcinogenic effects of heavy metals on Mexicans and the relevant policy implications, with the goal of publishing a research-policy paper summarizing exposure-outcome findings and providing a policy proposal for the new Obrador government in Mexico.

After graduation, Harry hopes to go to medical school and pursue a career that combines clinical work  with epidemiology and public policy. Since coming to BC, he has been challenged to think broadly in terms of ways he can work to further the common good. He is profoundly grateful for the Clough Center’s support and is excited to learn more about applied public health and public policy this summer.

Upon graduation, she aims to find work which interacts with the governmental and non-profit sectors both. Her dream is to start off by working in outside of the United States, doing research concerning gender issues. However, she hopes that eventually, she will have the opportunity to be involved in the U.S. foreign policy as well. After obtaining her Bachelor's degree, she will be taking a couple years to work before applying to Law School, where she will most likely be focusing on international law.

---

Sydney Shugrue

Sydney Shugrue is a rising Senior in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences from Chicago, Illinois.  She majors in International Studies with a concentration in cooperation and conflict and is minoring in English.  At Boston College Sydney has been selected as Co-Editor in Chief of Kaleidoscope International Journal, BC’s undergraduate staffed international affairs publication.  Additionally, she is an undergraduate research assistant in the Political Science Department and is a member of the Boston College Symphonic Band.  Sydney is being published in an upcoming issue of BC’s Medical Humanities Journal.  During the Fall of 2018, Sydney interned with McAdam Financial Group in Boston, focusing on marketing and digital communication.   She just returned from semester study abroad in Rome, Italy where she gained a new perspective on how European countries interact in the world.

This summer Sydney will be working as an intern at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office in Chicago, Illinois.  The Cook County State’s Attorney’s office is the second largest prosecutor’s office in the nation and is responsible for the prosecution of all misdemeanor and felony crimes committed in Cook County, one the largest counties in the U.S.  The office Sydney will be working in has 30 court rooms and handles all aspects of more than 30,000 felony cases and several hundred thousand misdemeanor cases each year.  Her responsibilities will include conducting legal research for pre-trial motions and trials.  She also will aid Assistant State’s Attorneys in obtaining and copying Discovery for distribution to defense counsel and use online tools to obtain video footage from Chicago Police Body Worn and Squad Car Dash cameras. Additional duties include burning DVDs of video footage for use in court and distribution to defense and organizing case files for attorney use during court call. She also will obtain documents, such as Certified Copies of Conviction, from the Clerk’s office.

Sydney is hoping to gain first-hand experience about the structure and function of our criminal justice system.  She anticipates participating actively in all aspects of criminal prosecutions, obtaining critical insight into the operations of a major prosecutor’s office.

Sydney plans to pursue a degree in law with a focus on international justice.

---

Janani Sundaresan

My name is Janani Sundaresan and I am originally from Potomac, Maryland. Currently, I am a rising junior pursuing a B.S. in Biology in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences! At BC outside of my courses, I work at the Women’s Center as a staff member and help lead BC’s Bystander Intervention program. I am also part of Globemed’s executive board which has fostered an immense amount of dedication and continued passion for learning to work against barriers to healthcare. On Globemed’s e-board I am the GROW Internship Coordinator so I will be leading this year’s internship at our partner organization CORD Siruvani in Tamil Nadu, India.

One of the main resources that CORD provides for the Siruvani community are weekly clinics that offer essential medical care such as vaccinations and Pap smears. To address environmental health determinants, CORD has constructed outhouses in the villages to combat the persistent problem of open defecation. Removal of waste from the public can prevent communicable diseases, reducing the need for later medical care. CORD also provides reusable trash bags and biodegradable cutlery so collecting garbage does not create another health risk. CORD addresses the social determinants of health with Mahila Mandals (women empowerment groups) and counseling services. The empowerment groups are a support system for women struggling with similar issues and a resource that provides concrete strategies and services.

CORD operates through grassroots partnerships that establish trusting relationships and pave the way for sustainable change while emphasizing equitable participation between groups. My role as coordinator will be to support community members in what they need at the time and to learn from their extensive knowledge of leading a grassroots initiative that really impacts the root problems that impact marginalized groups in the community. I will also able to be observe and evaluate he programs in place to see how to improve them with the community members. We highly value productive and empowering partnerships that are in place to first and foremost positively affect the people seeking high quality and equal access to health care and resources. As an Indian American woman studying public health, I see it as an opportunity and a responsibility to increase awareness around these public health disparities especially those that affect women, who are central to the health of families and the prosperity of every community. I hope to use this opportunity to expand my experience with working in the public health field and empowering communities that have experienced internal or external oppression.

After graduating, I hope to go to medical school and use my education and training to serve communities that are marginalized in the US through providing health care resources and care. I am very grateful for the Clough Center’s support with this project!

---

Emma Wallace

Emma Wallace is a rising senior at Boston College from Montclair, New Jersey. She is majoring in Economics and minoring in International Studies and Management and Leadership. This past semester, Emma studied abroad in Seville, Spain, at the Pablo de Olavide University in its Spanish Studies Program. At Boston College, the main student organizations that Emma is a part of are the Student Admissions Program, Eagle Volunteers, and Subturri, the Boston College yearbook committee.

This summer, Emma is working as a congressional intern at the United States House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. She is extremely excited to apply her skills and knowledge to this new work environment and gain valuable work experience in this career field. For this internship, Emma will have an array of tasks and responsibilities in support of the functioning of the office, including responding to constituent telephone inquiries and logging those into the office database and handling other office staffing needs. She is additionally responsible for arranging and giving tours of the United States Capitol building to constituents, attending and taking notes on legislative briefings on behalf of staff members, and drafting briefing documents and press releases. She will also be assisting with constituent correspondence, legislative research, and other special projects over the course of her ten-week internship as assigned. All the work that Emma does will be to ensure that the office runs smoothly and efficiently and that she helps staff in any way possible.

As for future career plans, public policy and international business are two potential career fields that Emma is considering at this point. Working at the House of Representatives will give her a good first-hand look at the nexus between public policy and how the legislative process works and will be a good foundation for either of these fields. Emma is also considering working for a government organization, and this internship will give good exposure to and provide transferable skills to transitioning into such a role.

---

 

Stephanie Walsh

Stephanie Walsh is a rising senior from Norwalk, Connecticut. She is an honors student in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences with a major in Political Science and a minor in English. On campus, Stephanie is a captain of the mock trial team and will be working as Writing Specialist with the English department’s Writing Center Pilot. This summer, Stephanie will be returning to Washington, D.C. to work for the Administrative Office of the United States Federal Courts. The Administrative Office of the United States Federal Courts (the AO) is an administrative agency that provides financial, legal, legislative, managerial, technological, and programmatic support to the Judicial Conference and to all levels of the federal judiciary. While she was interning at the AO last summer, Stephanie gained valuable experience working with the Judicial Conference Committee on Court Administration (CACM). This summer, she is thrilled to accept a new position as an intern in the Office of Public Affairs. The AO’s Office of Public Affairs address all inquiries from Congress, the media, and the public. Additionally, the Office also manages all of the federal Judiciary’s web, video production services, and social media presence. She will have similar tasks as last summer, which range from research to customer service to data management. For example, she will maintain case files; prepare and analyze reports; proofread, revise, and edit documents; support web contents; and assist with liaison matters for Judiciary committees and subcommittees. She will also have new responsibilities, which will include composing press releases and memos, attend public outreach events, work with civics education projects, build the Administrative Office’s website, and improve the Administrative Office’s social media presence. Excited to explore Washington, D.C. and to learn more about the federal judicial process, Stephanie looks forward to gaining government-related skills and experience. She hopes to attend law school soon after graduation.

Jaclyn Carroll
Sociology

Jaclyn Carroll is a 5^th year doctoral candidate in the Sociology department at Boston College.  She received her BA in Sociology from The College of William & Mary in 2013, and her MA in Communication & Advocacy Studies from James Madison University in 2015.  Jaclyn studies discourse, social control & authority, medical sociology, and the formation of social problems.  Her work examines the relationships between the public and different industries, and considers how these relationships are shaped by the public’s regulatory expectations.  Her work has examined philanthropic fundraising, the energy sector, and the wellness industry.

Last year the Clough Center funded Jaclyn’s ethnographic project on a rural community’s fight to resist industrial coal development in their county.  The project focused on the unconventional relationship citizens had with local, state, and federal regulatory agencies.  Jaclyn’s research found that their successes were attributed in large part to their distrust of regulatory infrastructure and their creative integration of public hearing requirements into a broader campaign strategy, one that undermined the blueprint strategies of environmental advocacy groups and professional organizers.

This year, Jaclyn’s work with the Clough Center examines the emergence of nonprofit watchdogging agencies in the 1990s.  Her analysis of 30 years of news media critically examines the formation of charity fraud as a social problem, and the media’s role in formulating watchdogging as an opportunity for charity expansion, a necessary police action, and a service to wise donors. 

Jaclyn’s ongoing dissertation research addresses dietary fads, the earliest stages of which address the role of “pseudo-authority” influencers on the production of the “detox” movement in the contemporary health and wellness industry.

---

Megan Crotty
English

Megan Crotty is a Boston native and Doctoral Student and Irish Studies Fellow in the English Department at Boston College. She holds an MA in English from Boston College, and a BA in English and Dance from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research interests include empire, nationalism, and gender in Irish and Commonwealth literature. She is also particularly
interested in the position of women in relationship to violence and agency in contemporary literature.

Megan’s current project reads several texts by Irish novelist John McGahern against the backdrop of constitutional democracy and the feminist movement in Ireland. To this end, the project will focus on the impact of constitutional democracy on women’s rights in the Irish Free State and will consider the ways in which the drafting of the Irish constitution in 1922, 1933, and the final ratification in 1937 under Eamon de Valera impinged (intentionally and unintentionally) upon women’s political, social, and economic agency at a time when they should have been engaging in the construction of the post-colonial nation. The period of abeyance in feminist activism that falls between Irish women’s suffrage in 1922 and the onset of second-wave feminism in 1970 is of particular concern, as it helps to elucidate the subversive methods women women used to influence political discussions, enhance their own agency, and pave the way for the children and grandchildren to participate in their own public movement in the 1970s. This focus on strategies of abeyance will allow for the interrogation of the feminist underpinnings of seemingly patriarchal texts, like McGahern’s, that actually offer nuanced critiques of the state of Irish constitutional democracy in the twentieth century.

Ms Crotty has several years of teaching experience at the undergraduate level, and currently teaches undergraduate courses in English at Boston College, including a Literature Core class entitled “Pretty Little Liars: Secrets, Lies, and Fiction” as well as an upcoming English elective called “Harpies, Hysterics, and Fallen Women in Postcolonial Anglophone Literature.” She also helped to organize Towards Transitional Justice: Recognition, Truth-telling, and Institutional Abuse in Ireland, a three-day international conference that took place at Boston College in November of 2018.

---

Matthew Gannon
English

Matthew Gannon is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Boston College where he studies the politics of aesthetics, particularly the political dimensions of modernist literary technique and form. He has an interdisciplinary academic background, having received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology and biochemistry from Bowdoin College and his master’s degree from the University of Chicago’s MA Program in the Social Sciences. Though his research is now mainly focused on literature, Matthew retains an interest in the multiple media, cultural products, and social forms of modernity.

In his research at Boston College, Matthew brings together disparate strands of critical theory and continental philosophy, especially psychoanalysis and Marxism, in order to ask certain fundamental questions about aesthetics, such as: “Why is some art unpleasurable?”; “How does art represent history?”; “What is the difference between a work of art and a commodity”; and “How does art envision or enact meaningful breaks with the status quo?” With a focus on the literature of the former half of the twentieth century, Matthew’s research necessarily leads him to investigate art’s confrontation with the major political events and social movements of that period. Matthew probes the connections between aesthetic form and politics to understand how history in particular can be represented and formalized—and ultimately aesthetically radicalized—in literary texts themselves. His research seeks to demonstrate how even seemingly apolitical works of art participate in crucial resistances that use aesthetic means to disrupt the discursive frameworks of oppressive political regimes, historical narratives, and social structures.

---

Laura Gáti
Economics

Laura Gáti is a Ph.D. student of Economics at Boston College. She holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Bern, Switzerland, an M.A. in Art History from the University of Bern, an M.A. in Economics from the University of Bern and an M.A. in Economics from Boston College. Prior to joining Boston College, she has worked as an art curator in various institutions in Bern, and as an economist at the Swiss National Bank in Zürich, Switzerland.

Laura’s research interests fall broadly within the categories of macroeconomics and monetary economics, with a special focus on expectations. Accordingly, a recurring theme in her work is the role of expectations for aggregate fluctuations. In this regard, Laura’s interest intersects with the micro theory literatures on imperfect or dispersed information and information design, but she applies these tools to the study of the macroeconomy.  

One project Laura is working on examines a specific information design problem: the communication problem of central banks. In particular, the paper generalizes the static communication game encountered elsewhere in the economic literature (Bayesian persuasion games or global games) to a dynamic setting, which is a key feature of central bank communication. The theoretical results are thus able to provide guidance for the design of dynamic communication policies.

A second project investigates one potential driver of medium-run fluctuations. Growth – long-run economic fluctuations – is a very well studied field within the economics profession and there is a large consensus on technological progress as one of the most fundamental engines of economic growth. This research project attempts to delve deeper into this commonly held view and explore one specific root of technological progress: investment in information and communication technology (ICT) goods. Results indicate that investment into the IT sector helped boost US productivity considerably in the time period from the mid-1990s up to approximately 2005.

---

Jean-Fancois Gauthier
Economics

Jean-Francois was born and raised in the French-speaking province of Quebec, Canada where he earned a bachelor degree in economics in 2013 from Université Laval in Quebec City. After completing his undergraduate education, he pursued a master’s degree in applied economics at HEC Montréal. As part of that degree, he wrote a master’s thesis in a field of economics called industrial organization. The thesis published in the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, focused on the impact that an illegal cartel of firms had on the market for asphalt in the city of Montreal, Canada. Jean-Francois is now a fifth year PhD candidate in economics at Boston College where he is specializing in development, labor and education economics, subfields of microeconomics.

In his doctoral research he aims to better understand what determines individual productivity.  In particular, he is interested in finding how cognitive skills and personality traits complement each other and how this interdependency affects individual productivity in different contexts. He believes that advancing our understanding of the key skills and traits that matter for performance is important because it can allow us to design policies to help people reach their full potential. For example, some people may lack certain skills because they were exposed to less favorable socioeconomic backgrounds during their childhood. This, in turn, can negatively affect their performance at school or at work and lower their opportunities. Hence, the policies that come out of a better understanding of productivity can help democratize chances of success.

In one chapter of his doctoral thesis, Jean-Francois investigates how one can measure the personality traits and cognitive skills of customer support workers. He studies how these traits and skills relate to performance on a variety of tasks, then he tests how different types of pay structures can help improve the performance of these workers. In his most recent chapter, he studies the determinants of performance of Boston College undergraduate students in the entry courses of the economics major. In the first part of this research, he measures the traits and skills of the students and estimate how they map into their grades and into the speed at which they learn the course material. He finds that certain traits and skills tend to be more important for performance than others. Unfortunately, he also finds that students who lack these traits and skills tend to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. As a result, these students may not have the same chances of success as more fortunate students. Therefore, in the second part of his study, he introduces a software to help students better learn the material in the targeted economics courses. He hopes that this software will help students compensate for their shortcomings and give to all of them an equal chances to succeed at Boston College.

---

Perin Gokce
Political Science

After attending college at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, I completed my master’s degree in International Relations at Boston University focusing on political economy and the Middle East. Before coming to Boston College for a PhD in Comparative Politics in the Political Science Department, I worked for the Turkish Consulate General in Boston, and on a research project on social movements in the Middle East based at the Harvard Kennedy School. My research interests include democratization, comparative politics, state building, religion and nationalism and Middle Eastern politics. My current research focuses on the rise of religious nationalism in India and Turkey. My dissertation seeks to explain why and how religious parties came to power in two of the most secular states in the developing world: Turkey and India. Both are unlikely candidates given the strictly secular origins of both nation states and their founding fathers. In both, religious parties struggled for decades to unseat entrenched political parties to win at the national polls. Yet, since the 1990’s, both the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey and the Bharata Janata Party (BJP) in India have become not just successful but the dominant forces in the political landscape. What explains their astounding ascent? By exploring how lay political activists built robust political organizations that tapped into the dense networks of religious associations and movements, this dissertation will show how religious parties challenged their secular opponents and why they were able to succeed. I am currently teaching courses on Middle Eastern politics and Transitions to Democracy at Babson College and Clark University.

---

Thomas Goodman
Political Science

Thomas Goodman is a doctoral candidate in the Political Science department at Boston College.  He received his Bachelor’s degree from Northeastern University in 2009 before obtaining a Master’s degree from Boston College in 2016.  He specializes in American politics, parties and elections, the framing of the Constitution and its development, rights and liberties, and the growth of institutions and structures.  In particular, he has researched Progressive-era democratic reforms, such as the direct primary and popular election of Senators, and their impact on political parties.  He currently teaches American Government as an adjunct professor at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts.

In his dissertation, Thomas examines senatorial campaigns prior to their direct election in 1913 via the Seventeenth Amendment, focusing on methods senators undertook to secure re-election when state legislatures rendered the ultimate decision and more specifically, whether they were democratically accountable.  To address these questions, he has devised a causal model so as to measure the extent to which each state’s partisan breakdown, senatorial retention rate, and region may have contributed to the tendency for senators to engage in public appeals.  He has researched newspaper coverage of senatorial elections during the period, as well as official and personal correspondences of the senators themselves to glean the extent to which they were sensitive to these electoral pressures.  His evidence supports the theory that senators were, in fact, beginning to cultivate popular support to assert leverage vis-a-vis powerful elites and state legislators.  The demos, so to speak, represented a key coalition partner for senators in their efforts to secure re-election even before the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, when the preponderance of power rested with party elites.   

Thomas’ dissertation tells a story of how parties adapted to changing conditions to remain viable and survive politically in a new age.  As they had done with direct primaries, political parties grappled with calls for popular election of senators by seeking to pre-empt the fervor for greater democratic control over electoral procedures and co-opt their authority over the process.  Additionally, the research illustrates elements of the emergent “modern campaign,” those recognizable features of contemporary, popular campaigning which obtained during the period of indirect selection.  More broadly, Thomas is analyzing the impetus for structural reforms, themselves democratic in nature, which were designed to foster greater participation by the masses, accountability of public officials, and responsiveness of governmental institutions and their implication for constitutional and political development.

---

Maheen Haider
Sociology

Maheen Haider is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Boston College, where she studies the processes of immigration, acculturation, and issues of race and ethnicity. Her research looks at the complex construction of non-White, high skilled, and Muslim immigrant identity in the US, transitioning from the short to long-term migrant status, and embodying the first generation experience. Her scholarship contributes to the study of immigration and intersects with subfields of race and ethnicity, life course, and globalization studies.

The intersectional non-white, high skilled, Muslim migrant identity presents a unique window in studying contemporary immigration in post 9/11 and post Trump America, across the lines of racially and religiously diverse, high skill immigrants today. Her dissertation research “Race, Religion, and Class at the Intersection of High Skilled Immigration” takes a comprehensive approach to understanding the contemporary processes of high skilled immigration. She looks at the experiences of both short-term migrants as Pakistani international students studying in the American university and long-term migrant as Pakistani permanent residents to examine their acculturation and assimilation in the US. The study of these populations (high skilled Muslim migrants of color) is essential to unraveling the processes of integration.

Beyond her dissertation, a key area of her research examines the construction of the Muslim identity in visual media, specifically the post 9/11 representations of Muslims and Arabs across high grossing Hollywood films.  The project was also supported by the Clough Center. Before coming to Boston College, she received a Masters in Social Development from the University of Sussex and has a Bachelors degree in Software Engineering from Pakistan. She has experience of working within the corporate and non-profit sector in Pakistan and the UK.

Ms. Haider is also the recipient of the Dissertation Fellowship Award for the academic year 2019/2020 and was recently awarded the Donald White Teaching Award for her excellence in teaching.

---

Nicholas Hayes
Theology

Nicholas Hayes is a fourth 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, and effectively “order” (in the Thomistic sense of “orient”) them to the common good. 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).

---

Krisztina Horvath
Economics

Krisztina Horvath is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Economics Department at Boston College, where she studies consumer choice and the organization of health insurance markets. She holds an MA in Economics from the Central European University and a BA in Finance from the Corvinus University of Budapest.

Krisztina’s primary research interest lies in the intersection of Health Economics, Behavioral Industrial Organization and Public Finance. Her current work focuses on different aspects of the Affordable Care Act.

Motivated by the current intense health care debate in the US and recent advances in Behavioral Economics, Krisztina’s dissertation research examines the importance of higher enrollment rates in stabilizing the private individual health insurance market. She studies how simple nudging policies could increase enrollment rates among the healthier population by reducing the cognitive effort costs associated with enrollment. The main results of her paper show that these simple behavioral policies have the potential to increase enrollment rates and maintain the stability of the private individual health insurance market in the long run. These findings provide important new insights for health care policy design, especially given the recent repeal of the most important stabilizing tool of the ACA, the individual mandate.

In other co-authored research, Krisztina also works on a project sponsored by the American Cancer Society that aims to study the impacts of the health care reform on prevention and early detection of women’s cancers using health insurance claims data.

Krisztina has presented her work at the Rising Star Session of the International Industrial Organization Conference in Boston, the International Health Economics Association Congress in Basel, the European Health Economics Association Conference in Maastricht, the Graduate Student Workshop of the Western Economic Association International in San Francisco, and the Conference of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics in Barcelona.

---

Kimberly Humphrey
Theology

A New England native back from the Midwest, Kimberly Humphrey is a PhD candidate in the Theology department at Boston College, specializing in systematic theology and minoring in practical theology. She holds an M.T.S. from Boston College School of Theology and Ministry (2014) and a B.A. from Denison University in Religious Studies and English Literature (2012), where the opportunity to conduct independent, interdisciplinary research inspired her to pursue graduate studies. Her research enters into conversation with the work of political and liberationist theologies, especially black and womanist theologies, the cultural politics of emotion, trauma studies, and critical race and feminist theories. She is interested in exploring how appealing to and deploying emotion in public discourse functions to excuse irresponsible avoidance of or demand a more adequate reckoning with the brutal histories that are our present. She is especially concerned with how various interpretations of theological doctrines can support or undermine the toxic deployment of emotion.    

In her dissertation, “The Role of Shame in the Sin of White Supremacy,” she endeavors to articulate a theological anthropology that counters “white fragility” and interrupts the toxic circulation of emotion that has long subjected some to persistent, death-dealing shame while shielding others from shame at all costs. The dissertation considers how the U.S. Catholic Church’s elision of its participation in antiblackness in its self-narration collaborates with this toxic economy of shame. It goes on to analyze how well positioned different theologies of sin—from fundamental European Catholics theologies of the 20th century to black, womanist, and white antiracist theologies—are to address this barrier to grace and promote consistent, concerted, and systemic conversion.

Kimberly is committed to a transformative pedagogical, religious, and political praxis. In her years at Boston College, she has enjoyed cultivating feminist spaces for theologians, acting as a student representative to the Boston Theological Institute, and serving on BC’s Sexual Assault Network. Kimberly is passionate about teaching and learning. She is committed to fostering just, creative, and rigorous spaces where students collaborate in order to identify and more richly understand the many points where the theological, personal, and political intersect. At Boston College she has taught in the theology core and co-taught a pilot course for graduate students entitled “Responding to Campus Sexual Assault: Training for Future Faculty.” She looks forward to continuing her work as a practical, political theologian in service to the wider society, church, and academy.

---

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 early and nineteenth-century American literature, radical democracy, and critical theory.

His dissertation, tentatively titled “American Imperceptions: The Radical Political Forms of Sensory Perception,” concerns the relation between sensory perception, literary form, and political economy in nineteenth-century American literature. More specifically, Alex’s project investigates how literary form functions as an extra-sensory apparatus that trains the senses to become sensitive to the politico-economic forces that govern the world. 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. His dissertation explores these issues in writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Martin Delany, Herman Melville, David Walker, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 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 the literary text requires that we engage literature primarily as an aesthetic object, as opposed to focusing strictly on the historical record. A version of a chapter from his dissertation, “Economic Imperception; or, Reading Capital on the Beach with Thoreau” is forthcoming in American Literary History. His work has also appeared in Polygraph, and his reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism, SubStance, Comparative Literature Studies, and Modern Language Studies. He is Associate Editor of The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies.

---

Inhwan Oh
Political Science

Inhwan Oh is a PhD student in the Political Science department at Boston College. He holds an MA in International Relations and a BA in Political Science from Seoul National University. Before coming to Boston College, Inhwan had taught a range of courses, such as World Military History, the Korean War, Military Strategy, and Modern Warfare with a focus on the Iraq and Afghanistan War, for three years as an Instructor and Assistant Professor in the Military History Department at Korea Military Academy (KMA).

At Boston College, Inhwan specializes in International Security and Nuclear Nonproliferation. His primary area of interest revolves around how rising powers challenge naval hegemons and why there is a greater variation in outcomes of power transitions involving a maritime leading power. In particular, he looks to cases in which once democratic rising powers proved vulnerable to the radical nationalism at domestic level when contesting with the maritime hegemon, such as the Third Republic of France in the late 19^thcentury, the Weimar Republic of Germany, and the Showa democracy of Japan during the interwar period of the 20^th century. With regard to Nuclear Nonproliferation, he sheds light on the international and domestic conditions under which regional nuclear powers forgo their nuclear weapons or programs. Specifically, his research focuses on the role of domestic political-economic pressures, including democratization movements as well as economic adversities in authoritarian regimes’ decisions on nuclear rollback. He is also interested in Grand Strategy and US Foreign Policy.

Inhwan’s current work examines variation in domestic political-economic pressures that undermines the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes, which in turn renders such regimes more susceptible to international inducement toward nuclear nonproliferation. His research seeks to clarify a causal logic of authoritarian regimes’ nuclear reversal by integrating both international and domestic variables. In so doing, Inhwan attempts to show that contrary to the conventional wisdom, an authoritarian regime could also be vulnerable to domestic political-economic pressures, and thereby be more likely to accept demands for nuclear reversal from outside if its legitimacy is at danger. In a similar vein, Inhwan’s research also seeks to account for North Korea’s foreign policy after its acquisition of nuclear capabilities in 2017, a topic upon which he has presented a paper at International Studies Association-Annual Northeast Conference in November 2018.

---

Görkem Özizmirli
History

Görkem Özizmirli is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Boston College. He received his M.A. in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Koç University, Turkey, with his master’s thesis titled "Fear in Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatname: Politics and Historiography in a Seventeenth Century Ottoman Travelogue." Before his master’s, he graduated from the International Relations department with the highest distinction and a double major in Radio, Television and Cinema from Ankara University, Turkey.

His dissertation project seeks to explore the economic, cultural, and legal transformation of labor in the Ottoman Empire from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century through the largest group of laborers in Istanbul, port and transport laborers, and to explore new labor and capital management strategies that were developed by the state in the Ottoman Empire. In order to create the framework, presenting the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire through the lens of labor, his research focuses on the following four dimensions of eighteenth-century port and transport laborers in Istanbul: the consequences of the drastically changing economic structure of the eighteenth century for labor relations, labor as an agent against the canonical homogenized classifications of social classes in the "pre-industrial" Ottoman Empire, the spatial organization of labor, and the strategies that the Ottoman bureaucracy developed to manage labor.

While his dissertation project deals with the Ottoman Empire, Görkem's broader intellectual interests include popular culture, the history of emotions, labor history, narrative sources, economic history, and state formation in both the pre-modern and the modern world. He occasionally publishes non-academic pieces about contemporary politics.

 His research has been supported by Boston College History Department, Boston College Clough Center, and the Koc University Research Centre for Anatolian Civilizations.

---

David Sessions
History

David Sessions is a Ph.D. candidate in modern European history in his fifth year at Boston College. He received his M.A. in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University, and a B.A. in journalism from Patrick Henry College. Before returning to academia, he worked as a journalist and editor for publications including Slate, Newsweek, and The Daily Beast, and currently writes review essays and criticism for The New Republic, Dissent, Commonweal, Jacobin, and others.

At Boston College, David has served as a teaching assistant for European and global history courses in the core as well as courses on European intellectual history. In 2015-2016, he served as a co-director of the Intellectual History Reading Group at Harvard University and was a Clough Center Graduate Fellow. During his time at B.C., David has also served as an officer of the Graduate Arts and Sciences Association (GASA), a mentor in Office of Student Life’s Graduate Mentor Program, and member of the organizing committee of BCGEU-UAW, the graduate student union at B.C.

David wrote his M.A. thesis on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, and his interests have spanned European intellectual history, the history of religion, the history of science and technology, and the history of capitalism, labor, and Marxism.

David spent the 2017-2018 academic year as a visiting student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he conducted archival research for his dissertation, Man, Machines, and Modernity: Inventing Industrial Society in French Social Science. Drawing on over 20 archives, in France, the Netherlands, and the United States, David’s dissertation shows how the concept of “industrial society” became a an organizing rubric for a set of social-scientific and political debates in France after World War II, reshaping the topography of French intellectual life and bringing it into close dialogue with global conversations about social systems, economic development, class conflict, and civilizational “progress.” Putting French social science into conversation with its international counterparts and exploring overlooked spaces in which social-scientific debate developed, the dissertation shows how French social scientists contributed a unique perspective on the debates of the Cold War period and the period leading up to 1968.

David has presented his research at the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Canada, the Western Society for French History, the Biennial Conference on the History of Religion at Boston College, and the American University in Paris. His work as been supported by the Boston College History Department and the Lilly Foundation.

---

Isaiah Sterrett
History

Isaiah Sterrett is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Boston College History Department, where he concentrates on the cultural, intellectual, and political history of the Anglo-American world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is particularly interested in the ways that activists and reformers, government officials, and ordinary men and women connected ideas about childrearing and domestic life to public affairs. His current research focuses on the Northeastern United States in the transformative half-century after the American Civil War.

Among Isaiah’s primary interests are nations, nationalism, and the modern state. In part, his work suggests that, on both sides of the Atlantic, state-building in the fin-de-siècle period often entailed the extension of official authority into the traditionally private realm of childrearing. In these years, the most liberal governments in the world approved and implemented new modes of intervention aimed at promoting the putative welfare of children—and, through children, society at large. His doctoral project concludes with an examination of the United States Children’s Bureau in its formative years and the national state’s ideological efforts vis-à-vis children during the First World War.

Isaiah Sterrett received a B.A., cum laude, in 2010 and an M.A. in Political Science in 2012, both from Boston College. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

---

Deniz Uyan
Sociology

Deniz is a current PhD student in the sociology department interested in sociology of knowledge, global and transnational sociology, and theories of race and political economy. Before coming to Boston College she earned her B.S. in Business Administration with a concentration in Economics from Babson College.

Her current research focuses on the historically relevant antecedents to the push for the creation of a new Middle Eastern and North African racial category on the 2020 Census. This work is attentive to literatures in sociology, political science, and history, in an attempt to define the process of racialization that is often used as an explanatory mechanism for discrimination against those of Middle Eastern descent. Scholars cite the process of racialization of Middle Eastern subjects in the United States, and this project attempts to ground this usage in empirical case work. This research relies on archival work done at the National Archives and Records Administration as well as interviews with key players in the movement behind the creation of the new racial category.

This particular research falls within a broader agenda in the field of global and transnational sociology. Traditional comparative historical work relies on comparative cases with discrete boundaries between case studies; e.g., variance in outcomes between states. This work takes a slightly different approach by trying to understand social phenomena—in this case new racial categories as recognized by the state—as processes that can help trace the connection between institutions of states and broader global and economic forces. By attempting to understand how racial categories become meaningful in particular social and political contexts, this work recontextualizes local and national processes within a global context.

---

Amelia Wirts
Philosophy & Law

Amelia is pursuing a dual degree in Philosophy and Law at Boston College. In 2017, she completed her JD at Boston College Law School, and, after clerking for Judge Harris Hartz of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she has returned to the philosophy department to finish her PhD. Her decision to pursue the law in addition to philosophy arose from her interest in understanding justice and oppression from the perspective of actually existing social conditions, inspired by non-ideal theory.  Non-ideal theory is a movement in political philosophy that argues that, to understand justice, we should reject the political philosophy methodology of describing the most just society and deducing the nature of justice from the contours of that society.  Instead, non-ideal theory argues that we must look at the real, imperfect, unjust world to begin our theorizing.

Amelia’s work in law has centered on civil rights, with internships at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice (now Lawyers for Civil Rights) and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. An internship in the federal district court in Boston and her 10^th Circuit clerkship enabled her to understand the workings of federal anti-discrimination statutes from the perspective of the federal courts.  These experiences in the legal field gave her to insight into the imperfect workings of our legal system and, paired with her philosophical training in political and moral theory, led her to the key questions of her dissertation.

Amelia’s dissertation draws on her philosophical training in democratic theory and her law background to critique the American Criminal Justice system. She argues that the system produces a unique kind of oppression of the group of ‘Criminals’ that includes both those formally arrested or convicted of crimes and those who are assumed to be engaged in criminality based especially on class, race, and gender. She will argue that the current system of criminal justice is not justified by any theory of punishment, and unjustly harms not only ‘Criminals’ but other oppressed social groups, including those who experience gender-based violence.

---

Byron Wratee
Theology

A native South Carolinian, Byron D. Wratee is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Theology Department at Boston College.  Byron studies Systematic Theology, and he is minoring in Comparative Theology with a focus on Africana and African-derived traditions.  Byron earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Stillman College, a historically black, Presbyterian college in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  He then earned his Juris Doctor degree from the University of South Carolina School of Law.  Before entering theological studies, Byron worked as a political activist and attorney.  He also serves as an officer in the United States Army and has deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.  After his deployment, Byron earned a Master of Divinity degree with a concentration in Theology and Ethics from Candler School of Theology at Emory University.   

Byron's current research interests include black liberation theology, political theology, mystical theology, and theological anthropology.  He approaches theological questions using critical race, postcolonial, and decolonial theories.  A lifetime gospel music singer and a classically trained tenor, he allows music and liturgy to inform his work.  

Byron views theology as a historical, contextual, and faith-based discipline that concentrates on both words and deeds.  Systematic theologians try to explain religious convictions and actions using ageless and up-to-date philosophies, arts, and sciences.  By focusing on minoritized, embodied cultures, Byron hopes to aid the church in better understanding what it preaches and practices in response to violence.  In particular, he wants to probe Christian theologies about peaceable diversity in a pluralistic world.  His proposed dissertation topic will explore terrorism. It will take as its social context the lives of African American military service members.  He will investigate how African American Christians participate in state-sponsored war-fighting abroad and experience state-sponsored racism at home.  The double-consciousness of African American military service members provides a context that reveals Christian notions and practices concerning human dignity with frankness and candor.

---

 

Jonathan Yudelman
Political Science

Jonathan Yudelman is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and Government at Boston College. His research focuses on early and contemporary liberal thought, early modern theories of progress, and the relationship between political theory and the changing international order. He is interested in the related fields of democratic peace theory, political development studies, and a wide range of 20^th and 21^st century critiques of liberalism.

His dissertation will be an attempt to understand the challenges and setbacks facing the liberal world order in light of the original theories and hopes giving rise to liberal progressivism in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Specifically, he will examine how the thought of Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes and Gambatista Vico, continues to shape political life in the Western world and beyond, both by originating the progressive hope for a more prosperous, equal and free world, and by foreshadowing ways in which that hope faces obstacles.

In light of the success of Immanuel Kant’s theory of progress in predicting important developments of the late 20th century, as well as the theory’s seeming failure to account for more recent reverses in the “liberal international order,” a critical study of the early modern origins of liberal progress is proposed. Kant’s theory of progress posits a two-stage development of mankind. In the first or pre-enlightened stage, human society rises from its primitive origins toward civilization, guided unconsciously and according to natural necessity, through a mechanism of individual needs and desires. In the subsequent ‘enlightened’ stage, a blueprint or ideology is proposed for the conscious improvement of the political order. These two stages of the liberal theory of progress, synthesized by Kant and most of his liberal successors, are drawn from independently emerging streams of early modern thought. The competing philosophical visions of Thomas Hobbes and Gambattista Vico exemplify this early split between the self-conscious ‘rationalist’ and unconscious ‘historical’ approaches to both metaphysics and politics. This dispute between Hobbes and Vico over human nature, history and natural law persists unresolved at the heart of the Kantian synthesis. Hobbes and Vico allow us to break Kant’s synthesis into constituent and uneasily combined elements, and this analysis further suggests the ultimate causes of discontent in progress grounded on Kant’s model. Renewed focus on the original and unresolved dispute between Hobbes and Vico serves as a point of departure to address contemporary concerns surrounding the global career of liberalism.

Jonathan’s broader academic and intellectual interests include ancient Greek and German philosophy, Jewish and Biblical thought, early modern science and philosophy, contemporary international relations, and American political thought. Jonathan holds a BA in Jewish Thought and an MA in Philosophy, both from the Hebrew University. He has published a number of articles on issues of culture and politics for journals including the LA Review of Books, Azure, and First Things.