Mary C. Murphy joined Boston College in Fall 2024. She is a member of the Political Science Faculty and also Director of the Irish Institute of Boston College. Mary’s current research focuses on post-Brexit Northern Ireland and relations with the EU and US. Her latest book, co-authored with Jonathan Evershed, A Troubled Constitutional Future: Northern Ireland after Brexit, Agenda/Columbia University Press 2022, won the UACES Best Book Prize in 2023. 

She is also the author of Europe and Northern Ireland’s Future: Negotiating Brexit’s Unique Case (Agenda/Columbia University Press 2018), which was one of the first book-length studies of Northern Ireland and Brexit. Her previous book, Northern Ireland and the European Union: The Dynamics of a Changing Relationship, was published by Manchester University Press in 2014.

Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin, the University of Paris (Sorbonne), and the University of Nice. He is the author of over 26 books on European philosophy and literature (including three novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or co-edited 23 more. He was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Higher Education Authority of Ireland, and chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. 

As a public intellectual he presented numerous series on culture and philosophy for Irish and British television and broadcast extensively on the European and international media. He is currently the international director of the Guestbook Project–Hosting the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality.

Erick Berrelleza, SJ, is founding dean of Messina College at Boston College. A Los Angeles native and a member of the USA West Province of Jesuits, Fr. Berrelleza received a BA in philosophy from Loyola Marymount University, an MDiv degree in theology and ministry from Boston College in 2015, and a PhD in sociology from Boston University. He served as a visiting scholar in BC’s Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life from 2019-2021. The son of immigrants and a first-generation college student, Fr. Berrelleza’s scholarship and teaching has focused on urban sociology and immigration.

David A. Hopkins is associate professor of political science at Boston College, where he has taught since 2010. He is the author or co-author of four books on American politics, including Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats, which won the 2018 Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the American Political Science Association. His latest book is Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, co-authored with Matt Grossmann of Michigan State University in 2024. 

Professor Hopkins has regularly written about contemporary political issues for news publications such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, and 
Bloomberg Opinion. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Michael Serazio is a professor of communication at Boston College who studies media production. He has published in the Journal of Communication, the Journal of Consumer Culture, and Media, Culture & Society, and authored The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it ‘Real’ in Media, Culture, and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2023), The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture (NYU Press, 2019), and Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013). A former journalist, he has written essays for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other publications.

Patrick Filipe Conway is the Ignacio Chair of the Boston College Prison Education Program. He earned his PhD in Education from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development. He previously taught Composition and Literature courses in the Boston University Prison Education Program, as well as worked as a criminal defense investigator at the public defender office in Washington, DC and Boston, MA. 

His research interests relate to the development and expansion of higher education opportunities in prison, including policy and media coverage analysis, effective teaching practices, and the exploration of student experiences in prison. His research and scholarship have appeared in the Harvard Educational Review, Educational Policy, the Journal of College Student Development, and The Review of Higher Education, among others.