News & Events

Anne Flaherty, associate professor of political science and public policy, presented her research at the APSA conference on Black Lives Matter and Indigenous Deaths in Custody in Australia and Canada. The presentation focused on the long history of indigenous peoples’ deaths in custody, challenges in the lack of coherent policy and resource responses and the potential for future changes in both countries.

Harry Wessel,associate professor and chair of political science, was quoted in a June 15, 2017, Eagle-Tribune story about the shooting rampage at a congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia,thatinjured five, including one critically. Wessel said the shootingputs a damper on the annual baseball game between Democratic and Republican representatives, one of the lastbipartisan traditions that survives in the nation’s capital. “Baseball games are a way to facilitate bipartisanship, but of course, that is now the exception to the rule,” he said. “Everybody is now in their silos. You have 3 million plus viewers of Fox News basically getting news that reinforces their own pre-existing views, and it’s the same with MSNBC on the other side.”

Jim Kaklamanos, associate professor of civil engineering and Zampell Family Faculty Fellow, was recently recognized with the Distinguished Service Award from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Tufts University, where he earned his Ph.D., M.S. and B.S.C.E. The Distinguished Service Award is presented to an alumnus or member of the Tufts CEE community who exemplifies service to their profession and the department.

Dr. Daniel Herda, chair and associate professor in the Department of Sociology, recently published a book titled “Chicago’s Reckoning,” which discusses the complicated history of race, politics and policing in Chicago to explain how crime works from the top-down through urban political machines and the elite figures who dominate them. The book was just awarded the American Society of Criminology Division of Communities and Places’s James Short Senior Scholar Award.

William Wians, professor of philosophy, served as co-editor of two recent volumespublished by the scholarly publishing house Brill. They are“Reading Aristotle,” a collection of original essays on the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle (co-edited by Ron Polansky at Duquesne University), and “Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy,”volume 32 of a leading series in ancient philosophy (co-edited by GaryM. GurtleratBoston College).

Melissa Zimdars, assistant professor of communication, was interviewed by the grassroots media website Weave News for thefourthpartof its “Attack on Academia“series with academics who have endured sustained campaigns of threats and harassment from the alt-right. Zimdars made national headlineswhen a document she created to help her students practice analyzing the credibility of various websites claiming to share news went viral and incurred the wrath of far-right organizations and individuals.

Merrimack Assistant Professor Dan Vlahos, a founding member of Design Museum Everywhere, has recently been selected to serve a three-year term on the Design Museum Council for the Design Museum Foundation.

Brittnie Aiello co-authored “’Grandma is the next best thing to mommy:’ Incarcerated motherhood, caring relationships, and maternal identity” in the International Journal of Care and Caring. Features incarcerated mothers’ separation from their children and conflicted feelings toward caregivers.

Father Rick Piatt, director of the Rogers Center for the Arts, was quoted in an Aug. 22, 2017, Burlington (Mass.) Union story about an interfaith peace and unity gathering at Temple Shalom Emeth in Burlington. Piatt said he attended the event “to listen, learn and be supportive.” He added that he is confident Americans will stand up against the type of bigotry that was on display in Charlottesville, Virginia, the previous week. “They (white supremacists) will not win,” he said.

Lisa Perks and Jacob Turner, both associate professors of communication and media, have hadamanuscript about their experiences working with undergraduate students working on scholarly research projects accepted by the peer-reviewed journal Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.