Spring 2024 department news updates
It’s been another busy semester! Here are some of the highlights of recent good news from our amazing faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and recent alums:
FACULTY
- Congratulations to Neha Gondal and Jessica Simes who both received tenure and were promoted to associate professor this month! This is a richly deserved accomplishment and we are beyond lucky to have them in our department.
- Ana Villarreal published her new book The Two Faces of Fear: Violence and Inequality in the Mexican Metropolis (Oxford, 2024) this month. In March, she was celebrated at the Cisneros Hispanic Leadership Institute. Ana will be presenting the book online at the next Ethnographic Café on Friday May 24th at noon with Ieva Jusionyte (Brown University).
- Debby Carr was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences for her outstanding scholarly contributions. Debby was also selected for one of five Arts & Sciences Term Distinguished Professorships.
- Lecturer Gökhan Mülayim’s paper, “Navigating the Dynamics of Private Security in Turkey: Reflections from a Field in Flux,” was recently published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
- Faculty affiliate Michel Anteby published his new book The Interloper: Lessons from Resistance in the Field (Princeton, 2024)
GRADUATE STUDENTS
- Congrats to Meghann Lucy, Sara Snitselaar, Kristen Tzoc for completing their PhD! They all walked in yesterday’s hooding ceremony, along with Gökhan Mülayim who finished his PhD last year.
- Meghann Lucy received an Honorable Mention for the ASA Mental Health Section’s 2024 Best Graduate Student Paper competition. She was recognized for her paper “Fighting Demons’: Stigma and Shifting Norms in Explicit Mention of Overdose in Obituaries, 2010-2019.” Meghann has also accepted a tenure-track assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice position at Truman State University, joining their faculty in the Fall.
- Kristen Tzoc has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor of sociology position at Hood College in Maryland. She will join their faculty this Fall.
- Ya-Ching Huang was awarded the BU Women’s Guild Scholarship and her extended abstract on pediatric palliative clinicians’ professional work was accepted by the ASA Medical Sociology section.
- Bahar Aldanmaz was also awarded the BU Women’s Guild Scholarship and the BU WGS Community Impact Award for her scholar-activist contributions.
- Taylor Beauvais was selected as one of six Graduate Student Fellows of the BU Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering for 2024.
- Allison Wigen was accepted as a 2024 Munson Institute Fellow in the Frank C. Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies at the Mystic Seaport Museum. She will be furthering her dissertation research on commercial fishermen’s artmaking practices by researching in the museum’s archives and completing coursework in maritime history.
- Elif Birced received the prestigious ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG) through Summer 2024.
- Kazi Mukitul received the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies’ (AIBS) Graduate Fellowship 2024 and will now be able to return to Bangladesh to conduct fieldwork.
- Leping Wang presented a paper on the substitutability of social connectedness and loneliness among U.S. older adults at the Population Association of America 2024 Annual Meeting in April. She was also selected as a Social Network & Health Fellow to participate in the workshop at Duke Network Analysis Center this past week.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
- Congratulations to our Sociology Class of 2024! This year we had 10 honors thesis students who presented their research posters on April 24th: Lilian Belisle, Amana Bhumitra, Michael Dupre, Riley Hennessy, Elizabeth Kostina, Sofia Marin, Camille Ofulue, Hannah Semaya, Jinxin Tian, and Junchu Wu.
- Graduating senior Jinxin Tian was awarded The Most Outstanding Poster for Session V at the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS) 94th Annual Meeting.
- Graduating senior Lily Belisle has accepted position as a Junior Research and Evaluation Analyst at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services (CASES).
- Junior Shre Venkatesan won the BU WGS Community Impact Award for their research with Professor Joe Harris.
RECENT ALUMS
- Sadie Cowan (CAS ‘23), now finishing the BU MPH program as part of the 4+1 program, received a Fulbright to go to India to conduct a public health research project on TB under the supervision of a professor at the School of Medicine in collaboration with a local research institution.
- PhD alum Meaghan Stiman (College of William & Mary) published her first book Privileging Place: How Second Homeowners Transform Communities and Themselves (Princeton, 2024).
- PhD alum Ladin Bayurgil finished a postdoctoral research project at the KU Leuven in Belgium and will start a new job as an assistant professor at the Turkish-German University in Istanbul.
- And PhD alum Jake Watson recently accepted a tenure track position at the University of California, San Diego.
