BU Social Scientists Promoted to Full Professor
Boston University President Robert Brown and Provost Jean Morrison have announced the promotion of 24 members of the Charles River Campus faculty to the rank of full professor at Boston University. Congratulations to the BU social science faculty members and CISS affiliates on their promotions!
Taylor Boas, CAS, Political Science, specializes in comparative politics in Latin America, focusing predominantly on campaigns, corruption, electoral accountability, and mass media, applying quantitative and qualitative methods. He has earned a reputation as one of the leading scholars on the politics of Brazil, with recent work examining the electoral activities of Latin America’s growing evangelical community. He has written two books, including 2016’s Presidential Campaigns in Latin America: Electoral Strategies and Success Contagion with a third currently under review, along with 10 book chapters and numerous journal articles, book reviews, and working papers examining elections in Central and South America.
Stephanie Curenton, Wheelock, Educational Leadership & Policy Studies, studies the social, cognitive, and language development of racially marginalized children within various contexts, including parent-child interactions, early childhood care and education, professional development of the early childhood workforce, and related policies at the state and federal level. She is executive director of the BU Center on the Ecology of Early Development and associate editor of Early Education and Development and was recently named Mentor of the Year by the Society for Research on Child Development Black Caucus. She has secured major federal and foundation grant support for her research and published three books, two book chapters, and numerous widely cited articles in top journals, including Child Development Perspectives.
Jennifer Greif Green, Wheelock, Teaching & Learning, is a child clinical psychologist, whose work focuses on supporting students with emotional/behavioral disorders and bullying prevention. Specifically, she studies teacher identification of students with mental health needs, racial and ethnic disparities in mental health service access, and youth bullying involvement. She co-directs the BU Social Adjustment and Bullying Prevention Laboratory and is editor of the Journal of Education. Her research is supported by several federal grants, and she has published four book chapters and over 60 articles in elite education and psychology journals, including School Mental Health. She has been named a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher multiple times and is a past recipient of Wheelock’s Excellence in Graduate Advising Award.
Tarek Hassan, CAS, Economics, specializes in international macroeconomics and finance, as well as economic history and determinants of growth. He has gained recognition across his field for research into how portfolio-building strategies affect currency exchange markets. His more recent work applies natural language processing to earnings calls to evaluate firm-level exposure to risk, including political risk, Brexit, and COVID-19 – and how those risk factors determine outcomes such as investment and stock price volatility. He is a frequent presenter at international economics conferences and has published in numerous top-tier journals, including Annual Review of Economics and The American Economic Review.
John Marston, CAS, Anthropology, is an environmental archaeologist who studies the long-term sustainability of agriculture and land use, with a focus on ancient societies of the Mediterranean and western and central Asia. His research specifically examines how people make decisions about land use within changing economic, social, and environmental settings, and how those decisions affect the environment at local and regional scales. He has secured grant funding from National Geographic, the NSF, Fulbright, and the American Philosophical Society to support his field research and has published six book chapters and 18 journal articles. He is a past recipient of CAS’s Templeton and Gitner awards for excellence in teaching, advising, and mentoring and of the Archaeological Institute of America’s James R. Wiseman Book Award.
Lida Maxwell, CAS, Political Science, is a political theorist whose work touches on several related areas, including feminist theory, queer theory, contemporary democratic theory, environmental political theory, and law and politics. She has presented her work at the meetings of the Western, Midwest, and American Political Science associations, as well as at numerous American and European universities. A 2020 recipient of Contemporary Political Theory’s best article award, she has published four widely praised books, including 2019’s Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth, along with three book chapters and articles in top peer-reviewed publications. A fifth book examining the contributions of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman is in development.
Johannes Schmieder, CAS, Economics, is an empirical microeconomist whose research is at the intersection of labor and public economics. He is among the nation’s top scholars in unemployment insurance and has made significant contributions as well in the study of domestic outsourcing, job search and matching, and the source of wage differentials across firms. He is a past recipient of BU’s Neu Family Award for Teaching Excellence in Economics and the Peter Paul Career Development Professorship and has published over a dozen articles in top-tier economics reviews, including Journal of Public Economics and Quarterly Journal of Economics. He has additionally received two excellence in refereeing awards from American Economic Review.
Henrik Selin, Pardee, International Relations, is a leading scholar of global environmental governance, researching international environmental cooperation and policy making in the context of advancing sustainable development. He has made important contributions around the governance of mercury pollution and other hazardous chemicals. He is associate dean for studies within Pardee and associate director of BU’s Institute on Sustainable Development and additionally serves as editor of Global Environmental Politics. His research has been sponsored by numerous agencies including the NSF and the International Renewable Energy Agency. He has published two books, including 2020’s Mercury Stories: Understanding Sustainability through a Volatile Element, along with 14 book chapters and articles in top journals.
Marcus Winters, Wheelock, Educational Leadership & Policy Studies, is an education policy researcher whose work focuses on how educational reforms influence student outcomes, including teacher quality, standards and accountability, and charter schools. He is the chair of his department and director of the Wheelock Educational Policy Center. His research is supported by major grants from several foundations, and he has published in top academic journals, including Journal of Public Economics and Economics of Education Review, as well as in media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today. He has additionally been selected four times as “outstanding reviewer” by the American Educational Research Association journals.
Min Ye, Pardee, International Relations, is a scholar of East Asian politics, with specific focus on Chinese domestic and international political economy and security, as well as regional relations with India and other developing nations. Respected as a leading intellectual voice on the Belt and Road Initiative and US-China relations, she has published three books, including 2020’s The Belt, Road and Beyond: State-Mobilized Globalization in China, 1998-2018, along with two book chapters and a dozen articles in important field journals, including the Journal of East Asian Studies. She is a recent Rosenberg Institute Scholar at Suffolk University, a past director of BU’s East Asian Studies program, and has received grant funding from the Smith Richardson Foundation to support her research.
Congratulations to these wonderfully talented colleagues on their recent promotions! CISS wishes them success in their new ranks.