2025-26 Faculty Affiliates
Prof. Marsin Alshamary (Political Science)
Marsin Alshamary is a scholar of Middle Eastern politics, with a primary focus on religious institutions, civil society, and protest movements. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled: A Century of the Iraqi Hawza: How Clerics Shaped Protests and Politics in Modern Day Iraq, which explores the historical and contemporary interactions between the Shi鈥檃 religious establishment and protest movements. Her research has been published in academic journals, including The Journal of Democracy, and she has provided commentary to various media outlets such as Al Jazeera and B海角社区. She has also consulted for organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank. As an educator, she teaches courses on religion and the state in the Middle East, state building and revolution in the Middle East, and civil society and democracy. She holds a doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and she is currently a faculty associate in the Islamic Civilization and Societies Program at Boston College.
Prof. Fernando Bizzarro (Political Science)
Fernando Bizzarro is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College, whose work explores the intricate nature, underlying causes, and far-reaching consequences of democracy and political parties. His current research explores the impact of economic inequality on political representation, the political foundations of inclusive economic growth, and the factors contributing to democratic stagnation in Latin America. Employing a combination of observational and experimental empirical strategies, Bizzarro examines both global and local questions concerning the functioning of democratic institutions. His overarching goal is to empower citizens and scholars worldwide with insights that not only enhance their understanding of democratic processes but also pave the way for expanding their welfare and upholding their dignity.
Frank Garcia
Frank J. Garcia is Professor of Law and Dean鈥檚 Distinguished Scholar at the Boston College Law School. A Fulbright Scholar, he has taught and lectured widely on globalization, international economic law and litigation finance reform in Europe, South America and the Asia/Pacific region. He is the author of, among other volumes, Consent and Trade: Trading Freely in a Global Market (2019) and Global Justice and International Economic Law: Three Takes, both published by Cambridge University Press.聽
Prof. Lauren Honig (Political Science)
Lauren Honig is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston College, whose research and teaching focus on comparative politics and the political economy of development in African countries. She is particularly interested in the politics of property rights; the roles of informal and customary institutions; natural resource politics; and state-citizen linkages. Several of her current research projects examine land rights and plural systems of authority. This includes her book, How Customary Institutions Shape State Building in Zambia and Senegal (2022, Cambridge University Press). Her research has been published in Perspectives on Politics, African Affairs, American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Democratization, the Journal of Politics, and World Development. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Fulbright Council, and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), among others.
Hannes Kerber
Hannes Kerber is an Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at Boston College, where he studies and teaches primarily 18th century political thought. Prior to joining 海角社区, he was the academic program director at the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung and a lecturer in philosophy and religious studies at the University of Munich, Germany. In 2022/2023 he held a position as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and in 2024 as a visiting professor at the Universit脿 degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy. His first book, Die Aufkl盲rung der Aufkl盲rung: Lessing und die Herausforderung des Christentums, was published in 2021 by Wallstein Verlag and was awarded the first Chodowiecki Prize by Interdisziplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies in Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. He has co-edited Leo Strauss on Plato鈥檚 鈥淓uthyphro鈥�: The 1948 Notebook, with Lectures and Critical Writings (2023) and Die Praktiken der Provokation. Lessings Schreib- und Streitstrategien (2024).
Florence Madenga
Florence Zivaishe Madenga is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department and the African and African Diaspora Studies program at Boston College. Her core area of study is in journalistic practices, specifically how journalists and peripheral media-makers challenge or are affected by state censorship. Her most recent research focuses on iterations of humor and journalism in tricky political contexts, satire journalism鈥檚 affordances and limitations as a liberatory practice in Zimbabwe, journalism in the United States, and popular culture in the African diaspora. She is currently working on her first book tentatively titled Black Satire Journalism: Dark Humor and Play in a Military Dictatorship. Her commentary and scholarship has been published in Information, Communication & Society, Media, Culture & Society, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, the International Journal of Communication and other journals. She holds a doctoral degree in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
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In 1908 Emile Durkheim wrote: 鈥淪o far as I know there is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.鈥� A few years later, W.E.B. DuBois opened his essay, 鈥淭he African Roots of War,鈥� with the Latin phrase: 鈥淪emper novi quid ex Africa,鈥� roughly translated as 鈥渙ut of Africa, always something new.鈥� As an Africanist and an historical sociologist, my goal has been to craft an historical sociology that challenges the preposterous, yet curiously persistent myth that Africa and people of African descent lie (as Hegel famously put it) 鈥渂eyond the day of self-conscious history.鈥澛� I aim to change how we understand sociology鈥檚 past, in particular its relationship to Africa and the diaspora, in order to reorient what we do as global and transnational sociologists do in the future. My work uses the tools of historical sociology to examine the role of colonialism in the production of social scientific knowledge and inquiry. I focus specifically on the history of sociology, demonstrating how a number of sociology鈥檚 key conceptual presuppositions have been informed by the legacies of slavery and colonialism.聽 I show how slavery and colonialism, events that have until recently been relegated to the margins of history, were central to the making of the modern world and, therefore, became central to the development of sociology, a discipline that is 鈥渋ntimately entwined with modernity, both as lived and theorized.鈥� The work I have done on this topic has appeared in Political Power and Social Theory, Current Sociology, and Critical Sociology, and African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.聽As an historical sociologist and an Africanist, my aim has been to show that because the development of sociology has always been so closely connected with the colonization of Africa, sociology has always been 鈥榞lobal鈥�. It has also, however, produced knowledge in the service of colonial power. The connections between the history of sociology and the practice of colonial rule are, however, not well known. My work aims to change this. Much of my work is oriented around demonstrating that the frustrations that sociologists are currently experiencing about the limited abilities of our theories and methods to meet the challenge of studying global and transnational social processes are the results of this particular aspect of sociology鈥檚 disciplinary history having been occluded. The inadequacy of many of the normative presuppositions that underlie sociology鈥檚 core interpretive premises are, I have argued, are the logical outcome of the elision of this key aspect of our disciplinary history.
Mary Murphy
Mary C. Murphy joined Boston College in Fall 2024. Her main research and teaching interests include: Ireland/Northern Ireland and the EU, peace and conflict in Northern Ireland, and the politics of Brexit on the island of Ireland. Her current research focuses on post-Brexit Northern Ireland and relations with the EU and US. In addition to being a member of the Political Science Faculty, she is the Director of the Irish Institute at Boston College. 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. The book examines the factors, actors and dynamics that are most likely to be influential, and potentially transformative, in determining Northern Ireland's constitutional future after Brexit. It offers an assessment of how Brexit and its fallout may lead to constitutional upheaval, and includes a cautionary warning about the need to prepare for it. She is also the author of Europe and Northern Ireland鈥檚 Future: Negotiating Brexit鈥檚 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. She has guest edited special issues of Irish Political Studies, Administration and Irish Studies in International Affairs (forthcoming) and her work has also been published in leading academic journals including The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, International Political Science Review and Territory, Politics, Governance.
Robert Savage
Professor Robert Savage teaches courses in Irish, British and Atlantic World history and collaborates with colleagues in the departments of Fine Arts, Philosophy and English to teach interdisciplinary courses that explore the intersection of art, memory, narrative and history. He served as one of the directors of the University鈥檚 renowned Irish Studies program for 17 years. Savage has been a Visiting Professor at Venice International University, a Visiting Fellow at the Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin, a Visiting Research Professor in the School of History at Queens University, Belfast, a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Galway.聽He has published five books that explore contemporary Irish and British history. His 2010 book A Loss of Innocence? Television and Irish Society 1960-1972 was awarded the James S. Donnelly, Sr. Prize聽for Best Book in History and Social Sciences from the American Conference for Irish Studies. His book The B海角社区鈥檚 Irish Troubles, Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland was short listed for the 2015 Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize. His most recent volume, Northern Ireland, the B海角社区 and Censorship in Thatcher鈥檚 Britain, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. His current project considers how the Northern Ireland 鈥楾roubles鈥� arrived in England in the early 1970s.
Michael Serazio
Michael Serazio is a professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Boston College who studies media production, advertising, popular culture, political communication, and new media. His most recent book, The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it 鈥楻eal鈥� in Media, Culture, and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2024), tells the story of America's obsession with authenticity and reveals the backstage strategies and practices to fake that on behalf of products, platforms, and politicians. Previous books include The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture (NYU Press, 2019), and Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing聽(NYU Press, 2013). A former journalist, he has written essays for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vox, and other news venues, as well as scholarly journals in the media and communication field. He serves on Boston College鈥檚 Journalism program steering committee and the Church in the 21st Century鈥檚 advisory committee and hosts the podcast, Formative, which interviews inspiring alums of Jesuit universities.