New faculty, 2024–2025

Célia Abele

Assistant Professor, French

Ph.D.
Columbia University

Where did you grow up?
My earliest years were spent in Bern, Switzerland, but I mostly grew up in Dublin, Ireland. My mother is Swiss and my father Turkish.

What is your favorite pastime?
Reading (for pleasure, though the line between work reading and fun reading can be porous!), going to the cinema, and road biking.

What made you decide to go into your field?
As a teenager I loved ideas (I majored in philosophy), but I also loved novels. I increasingly came to realize that literary form, that is, how things get said in a literary text, has a unique ability to embody ideas. It can go well beyond what the mere description of an idea can do and is close to how we encounter ideas in the real world, through our lived experience. I’ve also always tended to think historically, and when I came to grad school in the U.S. I realized that the direction the field had gone in meant that I could combine being a historian and a literary scholar. So literature satisfies all my cravings!

What work or publication are you most proud of?
I’ll be happy when my first book comes out—it started as my dissertation, so I’ve been working on it for a while! Other than that, I published an article on Marcel Proust last year that I want to feel proud of, perhaps mostly because it took so much work! On a superficial level, it’s about how the early drafts of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time engage with Balzac, but on a deeper level it looks at how that engagement reconfigures the relationship between the categories of life and literature; “life” was a concept of great significance to both the natural and human sciences in the 19th century.

What will you work on this year?
I’ll be making some final revisions to my book. It’s about material objects like diaries and various kinds of scholarly and scientific collections of natural observations, plants, and excerpts from books from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It argues that these objects constitute what I call a “document of self and world,” and examines how it changes throughout that period and how their material form relates to nature, time, and history.

I’ll also be working on a big new project, which will hopefully become my second book, and on which I’ll be teaching a 4000-level class in the spring. It started with an obsession with Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. Among other things, Rousseau’s text draws on accounts of the encounter between Indigenous populations and environments and Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries. I’m interested in the relationship between Western texts like Rousseau’s and the source materials on which they drew, and how that textual and archival encounter refigured ideas about how human beings should live in society and nature.

Diane-Jo Bart-Plange

Assistant Professor, Psychology and Neuroscience | African and African Diaspora Studies

Ph.D.
University of Virginia

Where did you grow up?
I spent my childhood in Kansas City, Missouri after moving there from London, England at the age of four. Growing up in KCMO instilled a love of barbecue, football, and Boulevard Wheat!

What are your favorite pastimes?
I love anything creative! I enjoy sewing and crocheting clothes, painting, baking new recipes, and salsa and bachata dancing. I also enjoy reading, so another one of my favorite pastimes is sitting out on the porch with a cup of tea and a book.

What made you decide to go into your field?
I've always been very interested in psychology generally. As a junior in college, I took a class called Stereotypes, Stigma, and Intergroup Relations. In that class, I realized all of the ways I could use psychology to research topics I had always thought about, that felt important to me to study and understand, and could potentially make meaningful differences in peoples' lives. I decided academia was the right path for me so I could choose what I researched as well as teach and mentor students, which I enjoy very much.

What work or publication are you most proud of?
The work I'm most proud of (article forthcoming!!) is a project I started while I was in Ghana about Ghanaian women's socialization and experiences with colorism. I interviewed 53 Ghanaian women about their experiences and messaging surrounding colorism in the school and family setting. I feel most proud of this work because of the impact it has on my participants. Many were grateful for the opportunity to talk about these topics and happy they took part in the study. It was hard work because I was also juggling completing my dissertation, but very much worth it.

What will you work on this year?
This year I will work on numerous projects. One area of research is how specific institutions shape individual understandings of racism in ways that reinforce white supremacy. I will be examining the use of euphemisms for racism in media journalism and psychological research, both areas with histories of perpetuating narratives that harm people of color and reinforce the status quo.

Fernando Bizzarro

Assistant Professor, Political Science

Ph.D.
Harvard University

Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Piracicaba, a mid-sized Brazilian city whose name, in the indigenous Tupi-Guarani language, means "place where the fish stops." This name reflects the city's location on the Piracicaba River, where fish migrating upstream would traditionally be stopped by the river's rapids.

What are your favorite pastimes?
Traveling and eating new things—my first stop on every international trip is a good, local grocery store.

What made you decide to go into your field?
I've always been interested in history and politics, and my first idea was to be a historian. But in high school, I had this awesome grammar teacher who suggested I study political science instead. Curious, I looked into it and realized she was right. Political science was a perfect fit for me.

Growing up in the early years of Brazil's democracy, I felt a disconnect between the promises of democracy and the reality I experienced. I wanted to understand why that was the case and how to fix it. Political science gave me the tools to explore these questions.

What work or publication are you most proud of?
In 2018, I published "Party Strength and Economic Growth" in the journal World Politics. This article, my first major publication, demonstrated that strong political parties can promote faster economic growth through improved policymaking. I'm particularly proud of this work because it challenges the prevalent negative view of political parties as merely sources of factionalism and narrow interests. 

My latest publication studied if letting voters ride free on public transportation on election day increased turnout in Brazil's 2022 elections. Shockingly (at least to me), it didn't. A few days after its publication, someone from the Brazilian Supreme Court contacted us to ask for info because the Court had to decide on the policy and wanted to consider its effectiveness. While we were disappointed by our null results (we all wanted it to have made a difference!), it was gratifying to know our research was being considered in such an important decision.

What will you work on this year?
A book on economic inequality and political personalism in Brazil, a second book on democratic advancements and stagnation in Latin America, and a project on political institutions and inclusive economic growth. Beyond academic work and projects, I will try to eat enough sushi at Yamato (now that I am within walking distance from it) so that they give me a VIP card or something.

Justin Brown

Assistant Professor, Art, Art History, and Film | African and African Diaspora Studies

Ph.D.
Yale University

Where did you grow up?
Providence, Rhode Island.

What are your favorite pastimes?
Finding (vegan) restaurants, browsing art auctions, exploring new hiking trails, and Mario Kart.

What made you decide to go into your field?
I took an introductory art history course as an undergrad, and the professor encouraged me to consider majoring in the subject. It was the first time a professor expressed a genuine interest in my academics, which had a huge impact on me as a young student.

What work or publication are you most proud of?
I feel most proud of a forthcoming essay titled “Afro-Surinamese Flag Shrines: Materializing Group Identity in the Eighteenth Century." The essay presents some preliminary ideas based on research in the Dutch colonial archives and will appear in The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production.

What will you work on this year?
I am working on a book manuscript titled The Cosmic Calabash. I also have two articles in progress. The first draws on my research about Surinamese calabash art to explore the possibilities of using artworks to recover what enslaved people thought about the world. The second presents a methodological framework for analyzing creolization in context.

Rahul Deb

Professor, Economics

Ph.D.
Yale University

Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Delhi, India, and had the good fortune of staying in Delhi till the end of my undergraduate studies.

What are your favorite pastimes?
When I am not being an economist, I like to spend my time in several ways: I enjoy playing soccer (badly) and squash (slightly less badly), and loudly yelling instructions (that are never followed) at the TV when my favorite sports teams are playing. I also love the cinema, the theater, and live music (especially of the heavy metal variety). Lastly, I am very interested in visual art, its history, and how the art market functions.

What made you decide to go into your field?
It was a very fortunate accident. I was a computer science major as an undergrad and never took an economics class prior to my Ph.D. My undergraduate thesis ended up employing tools from game theory. I was drawn to the breadth of economics in that economic concepts and methodology find applications in a broad variety of disciplines.

What work or publication are you most proud of?
I am most proud of my recent (hopefully soon to be published) research that develops a novel test to conclusively detect wage discrimination against workers from disadvantaged groups. We apply our test to U.S. Census data and document startling wage patterns. This work marries modern methods in labor economics and econometrics with theoretical tools that I (with coauthors) have taken years to develop.

What will you work on this year?
The publication process in economics is so time-consuming that in any given year, one ends up spending the bulk of one's time revising previously finished work so it can be published. In terms of new research, I am hoping to extend our methodology for detecting wage discrimination to study whether voters are biased against female politicians in U.S. elections.

Justin Henriques

Associate Professor, Engineering

Ph.D.
University of Virginia

Where did you grow up?
I was born in Lisbon, Portugal but moved to the U.S. when I was very young. I grew up mostly on the East Coast in Western Maryland and the D.C./Northern Virginia area, and I spent time in Chicago.

What are your favorite pastimes?
I love being outdoors with my family—especially in the mountains—whether it’s hiking, camping, kayaking, biking, or rock climbing. I also love to travel, explore new places and cities, and meet new people. Drinking delicious coffee is also a favorite pastime—you’ll usually find me with coffee in hand!

What made you decide to go into your field?
When I was finishing my undergraduate studies, I started a nonprofit that aimed to partner with community groups in underserved communities to address basic needs infrastructure. I worked on a range of energy and water projects with communities from East Africa to the Caribbean and Central America. These early experiences in my career significantly influenced me as an educator and guided my research focus in graduate school. The experiences also taught me the importance of human-centered approaches in the design of engineered systems and in using an entrepreneurial mindset.

What work or publication are you most proud of?
Recent work I’m proud of is a collaboration with partners in Northern Kenya called Peace Lab Studio. Through this work, we’re developing models and approaches that support peace and resilience through climate adaptation. We have some amazing partners in this work, including students who have been able to contribute.

What will you work on this year?
I will continue my research at the intersection of climate adaptation, sustainability, and peace in Northern Kenya. I’m absolutely thrilled to join the Human-Centered Engineering department here at BC and to help create opportunities for students to connect with communities—locally and globally—to contribute to the common good.

Florence Madenga

Assistant Professor, Communications | African and African Diaspora Studies

Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania

Where did you grow up?
My hometown and birthplace is Harare, Zimbabwe, but I spent time in a few other places in my childhood. I lived in Arusha, Tanzania for a few years. I arrived in the United States in high school and lived in New York until after college. I recently just moved from Philadelphia, and I now consider that a piece of home, too!

What are your favorite pastimes?
Movement and fitness (I love heated yoga, slow running, dancing, and functional strength training). Traveling to try different foods and explore other spaces is high on the list. I also enjoy binge-watching reality TV, specifically competitive cooking shows.

What made you decide to go into your field?
I was a journalism and politics major and a freelance journalist before graduate school. I always wanted to work in/with media. Eventually, I found that I was drawn to understanding how media systems function and why journalists do what they do in a more critical manner, which required me to delve into the scholarly side of "doing media." 

I love being a communication scholar with a focus on race and pertinent issues because it is the best of both worlds. I get to be in a field that is constantly moving because that is the nature of media, but unlike many journalists and media-makers, I also get to take my time to approach the "timely," which involves exciting intellectual projects.

What work or publication are you most proud of?
I am really proud of my first peer-reviewed journal article "From Transparency to Opacity: Storytelling in Zimbabwe Under State Surveillance and the Internet Shutdown" which was published in 2021 in Information, Communication & Society. The paper explores how storytellers circumvented state censorship around/about an internet shutdown creatively through humor and a Twitter (now X) thread. I didn't know it when I wrote it, but the ideas and questions I was asking in this article about media platforms, state power, and storytelling genres led to larger projects focused on my interest in playful media under political duress.

What will you work on this year? 
I am working on my first book, tentatively titled Black Satire Journalism: Dark Humor and Play in a Military Dictatorship. The book draws from data I have collected over a few years that shows how Black media makers in Zimbabwe specifically, and in the Black diaspora more broadly, manage to tell the truth where normative journalism practices fail to do the job. 

I am also in the latter stages of a journal article on visual mimicry and satire, and a book chapter in an edited volume on comedy cultures, and I expect to see both published in the next year. I am also very excited to be teaching my first two classes at BC, Black Popular Culture and Media Industries and the Internet.

Mary Murphy

Professor, Political Science
Director of the Irish Institute

Ph.D.
Queen's University of Belfast

Where did you grow up?
I was born in Cork city in the south of Ireland, but I grew up in Waterford city. Waterford is a small city on Ireland's south-east coast with a beautiful coastline and a rich history. It is also the place where the Irish tricolor (flag) was first raised in 1848.

What are your favorite pastimes?
Tennis, Pilates, gardening, and reading.

What made you decide to go into your field?
I grew up in the south of Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s at a time when the conflict in Northern Ireland—the Troubles—was raging. My memories of that time influenced my choice of study—politics—and later my place of study. I lived and studied in Belfast from 1995-2003. This experience added immensely to my interest and motivated me to pursue a career as a teacher/professor and researcher.

What work or publication are you most proud of?
I am most proud of my second book, Europe and Northern Ireland's Future: Negotiating Brexit's Unique Case (Agenda Publishing / Columbia University Press 2018). The text aimed to explain and analyze the myriad consequences of Brexit for Northern Ireland at a time when the peace process there remained a work in progress. It was one of the first books to be published on the subject and it marked an important moment for me in terms of my academic profile and career trajectory.

What will you work on this year?
This year, I will work on two small projects. One will engage with literature on nationalist movements and will examine discussions around Irish unity which are being conducted outside Ireland, and most specifically in Brussels (the EU's political capital). The second project will analyze the extent to which the U.S. influenced the Brexit negotiations insofar as they pertained to Northern Ireland.

Ligita Ryliskyte

Assistant Professor, Theology

Ph.D.
Boston College
Vilnius University

Where did you grow up?
In Panevezys, a city in the northern part of my home country, Lithuania.

What is your favorite pastime?
Hiking, especially in the mountains, walking, and cycling. I love exploring nature and staying active.

What made you decide to go into your field?
Why theology? Well, it's been quite a journey—definitely not without a bit of divine nudging! I spent years as a cardiologist and researcher, passionate about medicine, but something was missing. I realized that while I loved helping people physically, it wasn’t fully expressing who I am at my core. As a Catholic and a nun in an Ignatian community, I felt a deeper calling to explore how faith and reason intersect and to help others seek God more directly. My background and experiences, especially growing up in the former Soviet Union, made me deeply curious about the big questions, such as why we suffer and how faith and reason work together.

What work or publication are you most proud of?
My recent book, Why the Cross?: Divine Friendship and the Power of Justice. It was awarded Theological Book of the Year by the European Society for Catholic Theology in 2023. The book explores some of the most profound questions in theology: What does it mean for humankind to be saved by the cross? How do divine love and justice intersect? You can read more about it in this blog I wrote for the publisher's website.

What will you work on this year?
This year, I’m focusing on several exciting projects, including articles on the relationship between science and theology, Christological views on human solidarity, and the role of analogical imagination in theological reflection. I’m hopeful that these diverse themes will come together in a proposal for my next book, tentatively titled The Aporia of Kenosis.

Rishi Sonthalia

Assistant Professor, Mathematics

Ph.D.
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Where did you grow up?
Mumbai.

What are your favorite pastimes?
Basketball, video games, board games, and card games.

What made you decide to go into your field?
Understanding the mannerisms behind intelligence has always interested me. Since high school, I have been interested in artificial intelligence and mathematics. As I continued my studies, I became more interested in mathematics. However, many exciting mathematics questions have arisen with the advent of modern machine learning. This has allowed me to combine both passions and explore both.

What work or publication are you most proud of?
The work I am most proud of is "Least Squares Regression Can Exhibit Under-Parameterized Double Descent" with a student I advised, Xinyue Li. Understanding the relationship between the generalization performance (performance on new data) in relation to the size of the model and the number of training data points is important. In this work, we challenge the current established perspective and show that a phenomenon that was not believed to be possible can occur.

What will you work on this year?
My prior work has been on geometric machine learning and statistical learning. This year, I want to combine the two. Statistical learning has been limited to very simplistic models that are somewhat disconnected from practice. However, on the cutting edge, people have been using geometry to improve real-world systems. Having experience in both, I believe that there is a path forward to connect the two.

Aaron Stump

Professor, John R. and Pamela Egan Chair in Computer Science

Ph.D.
Stanford University

Where did you grow up?
I grew up mostly in the Midwest, with some time in Appalachia. As an adult, I lived mostly in the Midwest, except for California for grad school. So moving to New England is a pretty big change!

What are your favorite pastimes?
I enjoy classical and jazz music, and raising, with my wife, our three children, ages 10, 8, and 6. I also love reading history and books by or about Catholic saints.

What made you decide to go into your field?
I seriously considered philosophy, and continue to be interested in the subject, particularly philosophy of mathematics and logic. In the end, computer science won out. The two disciplines both prize excellence in the correct and orderly expression of ideas. With computing, I really enjoyed seeing my ideas do something concrete. Now, I work on topics that are at the intersection of logic, also studied in philosophy, and computer science. So both interests do live on.

What work or publication are you most proud of?
I am quite proud of a paper titled "A Type-Based Approach to Divide-and-Conquer Recursion in Coq," which appeared at the highly selective Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) conference in 2023. The work is about algorithms that ensure programs do not run forever. This turns out to be a very deep topic that is central in parts of logic, particularly proof theory, as well as computer science. As my mentees and I were working on this, what emerged as exciting was not so much the particular class of programs ("divide-and-conquer" ones) we could ensure terminate, but realizing that we could show termination without explicitly proving anything. Rather, one uses the programming language itself (this is the "type-based" part in the title) to enforce termination. That turned out to be a very exciting idea that is opening up a lot of new research for me.

What will you work on this year?
I am excited to start work at Boston College on topics I have been wrestling with for the past few years. One of these is related to computer-checked proofs, where logical arguments are written down in a computer format similar to a programming language, and can then be checked for errors. Such proofs are of interest in computer science, for reasoning about programs; but also in mathematics, for mathematical proofs; and even theology, where researchers have done work like analyzing the consistency of various sets of theological axioms. I have been trying, for the past five or six years, to find ways to include a powerful axiom known as parametricity into theories used for computer-checked proofs. Parametricity is a deep concept generalizing induction but has proven technically very hard to support. I have a new idea on how to add parametricity to an axiom system for computer proofs, and I am quite excited to explore this here at BC.

Megan Loumagne Ulishney

Assistant Professor, Theology

D.Phil.
University of Oxford

Where did you grow up?
Southern California in the suburbs of LA (La Verne).

What are your favorite pastimes?
I enjoy walking, traveling, and baking. I mainly bake sourdough bread and various kinds of sweets (usually with the help of my three-year-old daughter).

What made you decide to go into your field?
I had a circuitous journey into my field, which I always like to share with undergrads to try to relieve some of the pressure that they feel to figure everything out before graduation. I started out as an English teacher but was asked to teach a theology class at the high school where I was teaching at the time, and as a result, I fell in love with theology and changed fields. Making that choice was inconvenient at the time, but has been one of the best decisions I ever made!  

What work or publication are you most proud of?
My first book came out last year, and I am really proud of it! It's called Original Sin and the Evolution of Sexual Difference (Oxford University Press).

What will you work on this year?
I am working on my second book project which is focused on the entanglements of ecological thinking, aesthetics, and feminist theology. I also just received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to start a new research project studying nature spirituality among those who identify as "spiritual but not religious," so I will start working on that this year.