What the Constitution Means to Us 2024

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’a 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 BBC. 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. Mary Sarah Bilder (Law School)

Mary Sarah Bilder teaches at Boston College Law School in the areas of property, trusts and estates, and American legal and constitutional history. Her recent scholarship focuses on the early history of the Constitution: the concept of a Framing Generation, Native Nations and the 1787 Constitution, the early constitutional status of women, written constitutionalism as a new genre, James Madison's Notes of the Convention, the history of judicial review, and colonial and founding era constitutionalism. Bilder is the author of The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Harvard University Press, 2008) and Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Harvard University Press, 2017). Her most recent book, Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution (University of Virginia Press, 2022), is based on the life and constitutional influence of Elizabeth Harriot Barons O'Connor, a female lecturer and educator in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. Bilder received her B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin Madison, her J.D. from Harvard University, and her A.M. in History and Ph.D. from Harvard University in the history of American civilization/American studies. She was a law clerk to the Hon. Francis Murnaghan, Jr., U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

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. 

A.J. Jacobs, Author and Podcaster 

A.J. Jacobs is an author, podcaster and human guinea pig. He has written four New York Times bestsellers that combine memoir, science, humor and a dash of self-help. His most recent book is The Year of Living Constitutionally (2024), in which he tries to understand our nation’s primary document by adopting the mindset and lifestyle of our Founding Fathers. The result is “fascinating and necessary” (Booklist) and “marvelously witty and wise” (Kirkus). Other books include The Year of Living Biblically, The Know-It-All, and Thanks a Thousand. He has told several Moth stories, and given several TED talks that have amassed over 10 million views. 

He hosts the “The Puzzler With A.J. Jacobs,” a daily podcast produced by iHeart media, in which he gives short, audio-friendly puzzles to celebrity guests. He was the answer to 1 Down in the March 8, 2014 New York Times crossword puzzle. 

Prof. Min Hyoung Song (English)

Min Hyoung Song is the chair of the BC English Department and a professor of English. He is the author of three books, most recently Climate Lyricism (Duke University Press 2022), which received the Ecocritical Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. His second book The Children of 1965: On Writing and Not Writing as an Asian American won several prizes, including the Alpha Sigma Nu award and and the Literary Criticism Book Prize of the Association for Asian American Studies. He also general co-edited the four-volume series Asian American Literature in Transition (Cambridge University Press 2021) and co-edited the volume Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (Cambridge University Press 2015). He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters in edited volumes, and has also published essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chicago Review of Books, Public Books, The Margins, and The Washington Post.

Prof. Martin Summers (History)

Martin Summers is Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. He has particular research and teaching interests in race, gender, sexuality, and medicine. He is the author of Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900 – 1930 (2004) and the coeditor of Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America (2014). Summers’s research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Humanities Center. His most recent book, Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation’s Capital (2019), received the Cheiron Society’s prize for outstanding monograph in the history of behavioral and social sciences. Summers is currently at work on a book, Inner City Blues: African American Mental Health and the “Urban Crisis” in Twentieth-Century Chicago, which examines how social scientists, psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers, government officials, and community activists understood the relationship between urbanization and mental illness and consequently sought to address the mental health care needs of African Americans in so-called ghettoes.