Erick Berrelleza, S.J. was named founding dean of Messina College, the ninth school of Boston College, in August 2022. Part of the University’s $100 million Pine Manor Institute for Student Success initiative to enhance educational opportunity for low-income, first-generation students, Messina College offers a fully residential associate’s degree program with the goal of preparing students to complete a bachelor’s degree or to begin their careers.
A Jesuit from the USA West Province and a sociologist by training, Father Berrelleza’s research and teaching lie at the critical intersection of space and place, the sociology of religion, and immigration. In his research projects, he considers the contestations that occur at the microlevel by ordinary actors through everyday interactions and practices. He has studied the broad exclusionary effects of gentrification within an urban church in Boston, MA and the quotidian production and practices of sanctuary by undocumented immigrants living in spaces of confinement in the New Sanctuary Movement. His most recent project is a comparative ethnography of Latino religious life in urban and rural North Carolina in which he follows the everyday practices of resistance entangled in the local enforcement context. In addition to ethnography, he uses visual and spatial methods in this research. His work has appeared in City & Community and the Review of Religious Research.
In his teaching, Father Berrelleza engages the city as a lab, helping students to develop portable research skills through experiential learning in neighborhoods and their community institutions.
The son of immigrants and a first-generation college student, Father Berrelleza received a B.A. in philosophy from Loyola Marymount University, an M.Div. degree in theology and ministry from Boston College, and a Ph.D. in sociology from Boston University. He previously served as a visiting scholar in BC’s Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and as an assistant professor of sociology at Santa Clara University where he taught courses in urban sociology and immigration.
