Who We Are

Stanton Wortham
Inaugural Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean
Lynch School of Education and Human Development
An award-winning teacher, scholar, and documentary film producer, Stanton E. F. Wortham, Ph.D., is the Lynch School's inaugural Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean. A linguistic anthropologist and educational ethnographer with a particular expertise in how identities develop in human interactions, Wortham has conducted research spanning education, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. He is the author or editor of nine books and more than 80 articles and chapters that cover a range of topics including linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, “learning identity”, and education in the new Latino diaspora.

Samantha Ha DiMuzio
Doctoral Student
Lynch School of Education and Human Development
Samantha Ha is a doctoral student at Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction. Her research grapples with important questions regarding the democratic purposes of education, the pervasive role of identity in teaching and learning, and the power and potential of community-based learning. Her research is informed by professional experiences supporting community-based initiatives, diversity and inclusion efforts, leadership education, and college access programs on university campuses.

Qinghua Liu
Doctoral Student
Lynch School of Education and Human Development
Qinghua Liu is a doctoral student at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction. Her research interests include anthropology, transnationalism, and bilingual education. Her work is guided by previous ethnographic research and is centered on the well-being, academic and bilingual development of Chinese transnational children in the United States, and how these families navigate their children to build identity during the migration process.
Featured Guests

Gabi Oliveira
Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and of Brazil Studies
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Gabrielle Oliveira’s research focuses on immigration and mobility — on how people move, adapt, and parent across borders. Her expertise includes gender, anthropology, transnationalism across the Americas. Merging the fields of anthropology and education through ethnographic work in multiple countries, Oliveira also studies the educational trajectories of immigrant children. She is the author of Motherhood Across Borders: Immigrants and their Children in Mexico and in New York City (NYU Press). The book has won the inaugural Erickson and Hornberger Book Award by the University of Pennsylvania's Ethnography Forum and the award for book of the year by the Council of Anthropology and Education.
Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, Oliveira received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. Oliveira has been engaged in studying Brazilian migration to Massachusetts and has extensively focused on how immigrant children and families navigate newfound educational systems amid a global pandemic. She has worked closely with teachers in dual language programs whose students are Brazilian working to understand what the constraints are in educational practices in and out of classrooms.

Usha Tummala-Narra
Director of Community-Based Education & Research Professor, Psychological & Brain Sciences, The Danielsen Institute, Boston University
Usha Tummala-Narra, Ph.D. is a research professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Director of Community-Based Education at the Albert and Jessie Danielsen Institute at Boston University. She is also in Independent Practice in Cambridge, MA. Her research and scholarship focus on immigration, trauma, race, and cultural competence and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. She has served as the chair of the Multicultural Concerns Committee and Member-at-Large on the Board of Directors in American Psychological Association Division 39 (Psychoanalysis), and as a member of the APA Committee on Ethnic Minority Affairs, the APA Presidential Task Force on Immigration, and the APA Task Force on Revising the Multicultural Guidelines. Dr. Tummala-Narra is an Associate Editor of the Asian American Journal of Psychology, Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Senior Psychotherapy Editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and with APA Division 39 and Division 45. She is the author of Psychoanalytic Theory and Cultural Competence in Psychotherapy, published by APA (American Psychological Association) Books in 2016. Her edited book, Trauma and Racial Minority Immigrants: Turmoil, Uncertainty, and Resistance, was published by APA Books.

Thomas Groome
Professor of Theology and Religious Education
School of Theology and Ministry
Thomas Groome is a senior Professor of Theology and Religious Education at Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry. He is former Director of BC’s Church in the 21st Century Center, and for many years has directed the university’s PhD in Theology and Education. He holds an MA in Religious Education from Fordham University and a Doctorate in Theology and Education from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, New York. Prof. Groome is an award-winning author, having written or edited some ten books, over two hundred essays, two grade school religion curricula, and is the principle creator of the Credo Series, a high school Theology curriculum (from Veritas/Benziger). As a world renowned scholar of religious education and a dynamic teacher, he has received many awards, including “Master Teacher of the Year” from Boston College’s School of Arts and Sciences. He describes his life-long work as encouraging people to “bring their lives to Faith, and their Faith to life.”

Ryan Hanley
Professor, Political Science
Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences
Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Prior to joining the faculty at Boston College, he was the Mellon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, and held visiting appointments or fellowships at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. A specialist on the political philosophy of the Enlightenment period, he is the author of Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge, 2009) and Love's Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity (Cambridge, 2017), and Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (Princeton, 2019). His most recent projects include The Political Philosophy of Fénelon, and a companion translation volume, Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings (Oxford).

René Arcilla
Professor of Philosophy of Education
New York University
René V. Arcilla is professor of philosophy of education at New York University. He is the author of numerous articles and of the books For the Love of Perfection: Richard Rorty and Liberal Education; Mediumism: A Philosophical Reconstruction of Modernism for Existential Learning; and Wim Wenders’s Road Movie Philosophy: Education without Learning. His scholarly and teaching interests include existentialism, modernism, and liberal education. He has served as president of the Philosophy of Education Society and is currently co-editor of a book series published by Bloomsbury Academic entitled Philosophies of Education in Art, Cinema, and Literature.

Rebecca Lowenhaupt
Associate Professor, Educational Leadership & Higher Education
Lynch School of Education and Human Development
Rebecca Lowenhaupt is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. A former middle-school teacher and current parent of two middle-schoolers, she teaches aspiring school and district leaders about teacher supervision, organizational theory, and research methods. Drawing on multiple methods of empirical research, her research investigates educational leadership and policy in the context of immigration with a focus on new immigrant destinations. Her scholarship has appeared in several academic journals, including the American Education Research Journal, Leadership and Policy in Schools, and the Journal of Educational Administration. She has received funding for her research from the W.T. Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the National Science Foundation. She has co-authored several books including Navigating the Principalship: Key Insights for New and Aspiring School Leaders and Parenting in the Pandemic: The Collision of School, Work, and Life at Home.

Scott Seider
Associate Professor, Applied Developmental & Educational Psychology
Lynch School of Education and Human Development
Scott Seider's research focuses on the role that educators can play in fostering young people's civic development and critical consciousness of race and racism. He is the author of three books and numerous articles that report on the promising practices of educators committed to supporting their students' positive development in these areas. He also frequently presents key findings from his research to K-12 educators through book talks, podcasts, and professional development. At Boston College, Dr. Seider teaches undergraduate and graduate courses focused on adolescent development and social oppression and transformation. He previously worked as an English teacher in the Boston Public Schools and Westwood (MA) Public Schools and as a teacher educator at Boston University. Dr. Seider also currently serves on advisory boards for a number of different youth-serving organizations including Expeditionary Learning (EL) Education, the Journal of Adolescent Research, Character.org, and the Center for Parent & Teen Communication.

Greg Fried
Professor, Philosophy
Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences
Gregory Fried is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Boston University, and California State University LA, and Suffolk University. His research focuses on defending the liberal-democratic tradition against its critics, most particularly Martin Heidegger. Fried is also director of The Mirror of Race Project (mirrorofrace.org) exploring the meaning of race in America’s history, and he served as an executive producer for the documentary film "Before the Trees Was Strange," directed by Derek Burrows. He is the author of Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics. Together with his father, Charles Fried, he is the author of Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror. His most recent book is Towards a Polemical Ethics: between Plato and Heidegger.

Richard Kearney
The Charles Seelig Professor in Philosophy
Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences
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), the Australian Catholic University and the University of Nice. He is the author of over 24 books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or co-edited 21 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 in Ireland, he was involved in drafting a number of proposals for a Northern Irish peace agreement (1983, 1993, 1995). He has presented five series on culture and philosophy for Irish and British television and broadcast extensively on the European media. He is currently the international director of the Guestbook Project--Hosting the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality.

Beth Barsotti
Doctoral Student
School of Theology and Ministry
Beth Barsotti is a doctoral student at the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Theology and Education. Her research is poised at the intersections of Academic and Student Affairs in higher education and centrally concerned with fostering holistic formation. Her research interests include Catholic higher education, synodality, formative education, the identity and role of the educator, and college student development. Her interest in formation is rooted in her experiences living and working in a L’Arche community and further informed by her work within Catholic higher education and Catholic parishes.

Marina McCoy
Professor, Philosophy
Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences
Marina McCoy is a professor of philosophy at Boston College. She is the author of the books Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Wounded Heroes: Vulnerability as a Virtue in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Image and Argument in Plato’s Republic (SUNY, 2020). Her interests range from rhetorical and literary aspects of ancient philosophy to ethics and the philosophy of mass incarceration. She is interested in the figure of Socrates, Socratic self-knowledge, and human limits.

Keith Sawyer
Professor, Education
University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill
Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, a professor of education at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, studies creativity, learning, and collaboration. After receiving his computer science degree from MIT, he designed video games for Atari and was a principal at Kenan Systems Corporation, where he worked as a management consultant on innovation technologies for clients such as Citicorp, AT&T, and U.S. West. Since receiving his Ph.D., he dedicated his career to research on creativity, collaboration, and learning. A jazz pianist for more than 40 years, Dr. Sawyer lectures to corporations, associations, and universities around the world on creativity and innovation. He has published 17 books and more than 120 scientific articles and his research has been featured on CNN, Fox News, TIME, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and other media.

Andrea Vicini
Michael P. Walsh Professor of Bioethics, Theology
Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences
Andrea Vicini, S.J. is Michael P. Walsh Professor of Bioethics and Professor of Moral Theology in the Boston College Theology Department. Alumnus of Boston College (S.T.L. and Ph.D.), M.D. and pediatrician (University of Bologna), he also holds an S.T.D. (Pontifical Faculty of Theology of Southern Italy, Naples). He taught in Italy, Albania, Mexico, Chad, and France. He is co-chair of the international network Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church, lecturer, and member of associations of moral theologians and bioethicists in Italy, Europe, and the U.S. His research interests include theological bioethics, genetics, global public health, biotechnologies, environmental issues, and fundamental theological ethics. He authored Genetica Umana e Bene Comune (2008) and co-edited Ethics of Global Public Health: Climate Change, Pollution, and the Health of the Poor (2021); Reimagining the Moral Life: On Lisa Sowle Cahill’s Contributions to Christian Ethics (2020); Building Bridges in Sarajevo: The Plenary Papers of CTEWC 2018 (2019); and Just Sustainability: Technology, Ecology, and Resource Extraction (2015).

Ellen Winner
Professor Emerita, Psychology
Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences
Ellen Winner is a professor emerita of psychology at Boston College and Senior Research Associate at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has written more than 200 articles and is author of five books: An Uneasy Guest in the Schoolhouse: Art Education From Colonial Times to a Promising Future (2021); Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts (1982); The Point of Words: Children's Understanding of Metaphor and Irony (1988); Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (1996); How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration (2018). She co-authored three books: Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education (2007), Studio Thinking 2: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education (2013); Studio Thinking from the Start: The K-8 Art Educator's Handbook.
She has served as president of APA's Division 10, Psychology and the Arts in 1995-1996, and received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Research by a Senior Scholar in Psychology and the Arts from Division 10 in 2000. She is a fellow of APA Division 10 and of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics.

Alexandra Michel
Professor, Author, and Consultant
Graduate School of Education
University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Alexandra Michel is a professor, author, and consultant with ivy-league academic training (Wharton Ph.D.) and practical experience in leading organizations in the US and abroad. Her research has advanced scholarship and practice. It is published in the organizational discipline’s leading outlets and is taught to other scholars in top Ph.D. programs. She serves on the editorial boards of Administrative Science Quarterly and Organization Science. Her ideas have informed the practice of important business leaders and organizations. For example, she has worked with the Chief of Staff of Goldman Sachs to help the firm devise a new approach to executive education. Her clients include senior executives and organizations across such industries as banking, consulting, technology, business services, manufacturing, entertainment, healthcare, and education. Dr. Michel’s work has been featured in media outlets including CNBC, Fox News, Bloomberg TV, and NPR, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, MSNBC, TIME, New York magazine, Los Angeles Times, Forbes and other press in the US, China, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Romania, Argentina, and Brazil.

David Sellers
Human Services Professional
Musician and Writer
David Sellers is a human services professional, musician and writer. One of six children, he was born in the small town of Beacon, New York, and he had his first encounter with the criminal justice system at the age of 15. Through decades of experience with police and prisons since then he has seen first-hand some of the systemic problems with the US criminal justice system. These experiences also sparked his life-long study of human development and psychology, which have led him to better understand his own behavior and others. Sellers has also consulted as a legal researcher and advocate, and he was previously assistant director of the spiritual recovery programs, Strong Tower and Resurrection House. Sellers aims to use his personal experiences with the criminal justice system to help others advance educational, psychosocial and humanistic interventions.

Howard Gardner
Hobbs Research Professor, Cognition and Education
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Howard Gardner is the Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has studied and written extensively about intelligence, creativity, leadership, and professional ethics, and is senior director of Project Zero and co-founder of The Good Project. Gardner’s intellectual memoir, A Synthesizing Mind, was published in 2020 by MIT Press. He recently completed a national study of higher education with Wendy Fischman, The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be (MIT Press).

Matthew DelSesto
Doctoral Student, Sociology
Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences
Matthew DelSesto is a founder, coordinator and instructor of the Inside-Out Program and doctoral candidate in Sociology at Boston College. He has worked in prison and jail based educational programs for the last twelve years. Matthew holds an M.A. in Theories of Urban Practice from Parsons School of Design and an M.A. in Sociology from Boston College. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, The Hearst Foundations, and the Center for Human Rights and International Justice. He received the 2021 Robert Dentler Award for Outstanding Achievement in Public Sociology and Sociological Practice from the American Sociological Association.

Costantine V. Nakassis
Associate Professor, Anthropology
Associate Faculty, Cinema & Media Studies, and Comparative Human Development
University of Chicago
Constantine V. Nakassis is an associate professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences and associate faculty of Cinema & Media Studies and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. He is a linguistic anthropologist with interests in semiotics; film theory; mass media; brands; and youth culture. His regional focus is Tamil Nadu, India. He is currently working on a book about Tamil cinema, entitled Onscreen/Offscreen (University of Toronto Press). He organizes the annual Chicago Tamil Forum workshop and chairs the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (2020-2023).

Kenneth J. Gergen
Senior Research Professor, Psychology
Swarthmore College
Kenneth J. Gergen is a senior research professor in Psychology at Swarthmore College, and president of the Taos Institute. He is internationally known for his contributions to social constructionist theory, technology and cultural change, the self, and relational practices. His major writings include Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Construction, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, and Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community. Gergen lectures throughout the world, and has received numerous awards for his work, including honorary degrees in both the U.S. and Europe.

Megan Jane Laverty
Associate Professor, Philosophy and Education
Teachers College, Columbia University
Megan Jane Laverty Ph.D. is associate professor of Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She teaches graduate courses on ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of education. Her primary research interests are moral philosophy in its relation to education and philosophy for/with children and adolescents. Laverty has published numerous articles and is the author of Iris Murdoch’s Ethics: A Consideration of her Romantic Vision (Bloomsbury, 2007). She co-edits the Philosophy for Children Founders Series (Routledge) with Maughn Rollins Gregory, which includes Gareth B. Matthews, The Child’s Philosopher (2022). She is also co-editor of a book series Philosophies of Education in Art, Cinema, and Literature, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

Mark Freeman
Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society, Psychology
College of the Holy Cross
Mark Freeman is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the Department of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross. His writings include Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative; Finding the Muse: A Sociopsychological Inquiry into the Conditions of Artistic Creativity; Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward; The Priority of the Other: Thinking and Living Beyond the Self; and, most recently Do I Look at You with Love? Reimagining the Story of Dementia. Recipient of the 2010 Theodore R. Sarbin Award from the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology as well as the 2021 Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Foundation, Freeman is also a Fellow in the American Psychological Association and serves as editor for the Oxford University Press book series Explorations in Narrative Psychology.

Allison Pyo
Student, Applied Psychology &
Human Development, Economics
Lynch School of Education & Human Development
Allison Pyo '22 studied Applied Psychology and Human Development and Economics at Boston College. She coauthored a report on Boston College's Inside-Out program titled "Advancing Transformative Learning Partnerships" with sociology Ph.D. student Matthew DelSesto, and worked as a research assistant at the Motivation, Metacognition, and Learning Laboratory with Lynch School Associate Professor David Miele. She wrote her senior thesis on attitudes on education reform during industrialization in the U.S.

Anna Stetsenko
Professor, Psychology and Urban Education
Ph.D. Programs
Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Dr. Anna Stetsenko is a professor in Psychology and Urban Education Ph.D. Programs at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (with previous work experiences in Russia, Germany and Switzerland). Her research is situated at the intersection of human development, philosophy, and education focusing on agency and social transformation. Rooted in Marxism and its extension in Vygotsky's project, her work advances this project and brings out its political-critical edge while connecting to contemporary critical approaches. Her work has culminated in the Transformative Activist Stance approach with implications for research and what she terms a "pedagogy of daring." This is reflected in The Transformative Mind: Expanding Vygotsky’s Approach to Development and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is widely published in English and Russian, and in translations into German, Italian and Portuguese.

William Damon
Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence
Professor, Education
Stanford University
William Damon is Professor of Education at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence. He is one of the world’s leading researchers on life-span human development and author of The Path to Purpose. Damon is a member of the National Academy of Education and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His new book (August 2021) is A Round of Golf with my Father: The New Psychology of Exploring your Past to Make Peace with the Present.

Suzanne R. Kirschner
Professor Emerita
Psychology
College of the Holy Cross
Suzanne R. Kirschner is a professor emerita of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross, where she taught cultural psychology, the history and philosophy of psychology, and personality psychology. She received a doctorate from Harvard University, where she also taught and has held appointments in the departments of Social Medicine and the History of Science. Her books and articles explore how psychology and its sociocultural contexts influence and shape each other. Recent publications include “The Oversocialized Conception of the Subject: Desire, Conflict, and the Problem of Social order” (Theory & Psychology, 30th anniversary issue, 2020) and “Subjectivity” [in Slife et al. [eds.], Routledge International Handbook of Theoretical & Philosophical Psychology, 2022). Currently, she is writing a book that integrates insights from psychological anthropology, social theory, and literary theory to develop more sophisticated psychological approaches to the study of human experience and activity.