BU Arts & Sciences faculty and students are deeply connected with the city through scholarship, collaboration, and outreach. Our courses take students into the city, our programs bring students from throughout Greater Boston to our Charles River Campus, and our faculty study the people, places, and environments of Boston and beyond, solving problems and creating solutions to challenges facing communities throughout the world. They do this in partnership with the communities that we work in.

Building a Better Boston

“Some people will go work in government, love it, and stay. It’s equally important that people go and have firsthand experience and exposure to government if they care about policy. That experience can stay with them even if they remain in academia.” –Katharine Lusk, former co-director and founding executive director of the Initiative on Cities

Investigating Newport’s Ties to Slavery

“We try to bring home on the tour that it was not this great peaceful past that sometimes people like to think. It was a difficult time for many people who lacked rights, freedom, and economic ability. And so we try to really honor that. And that’s why we end with our empty frame. We tell a lot of new stories on the tour. But there’s certainly still more left unsaid.” –Mary Kate Smolenski (GRS ‘27)

Doctoral Students Return Home for Summer Research

“As someone who grew up in China under the one-child policy, I have a firsthand understanding of the gender inequality that persists in the country. This experience has largely motivated my dissertation research, and I am committed to doing my part in advancing gender equality.” –Ph.D Student Si Wu

Putting Boston-Area Brazilian-Americans on the Map

“This research study causes transformational change. Perhaps not in an explicit, huge way, but it can cause a domino effect. It’s a small ripple in the ocean.” –Renata Nunes (CAS ‘20)

Lagakos Develops Economic Change System in Ghana

“In Ghana, there is a lot of embezzlement. It can be hard to know exactly where corruption happens. Our research going forward will be about how the paper trail can be stronger and take away opportunities to embezzle” –David Lagakos, associate professor of Economics