Park Street Series
Two prominent scholars will give presentations at Boston College in this semester’s Park Street Corporation Speaker Series in Health, Humanities, and Ethics, which features experts in medicine, health care, and other related fields speaking on issues of values and ethics related to health and health care practices.
On March 21, Susan Burch, Middlebury College professor of American studies and a former director of its Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, will speak on the topic “Committed: Native Kinship, Institutionalizations, and Remembering.”
Burch’s research and teaching interests focus on the overlaps of deaf, disability, race, Indigeneity, and gender and sexuality in late 19th- and 20-century United States history. Her most recent work, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions, centers on peoples’ experiences inside and outside the Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric institution created specifically to detain American Indians. Co-founder of the Disability History Association and a former board member of the Society for Disability Studies, Burch also has coedited several anthologies and served as editor-in-chief of The Encyclopedia of American Disability History.
John Beshears
On April 11, John Beshears, the Albert J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School, will present “Choice Architecture Technique for Influencing Health Decisions.”
With a primary research area in behavioral economics, Beshears focuses on understanding how the financial decisions of households and firms are influenced by the institutional environment in which choices are made. He has studied participation in retirement savings plans, household investment decisions, and health-care choices. A research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Beshears received support from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, among others, and published his work in prominent journals and periodicals including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies.
Both events, which are free and open to the public, will be held at 7 p.m. in Gasson 100.
Established in 2016, the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series is sponsored by the Park Street Corporation and the Boston College Institute for the Liberal Arts. Find more about the series here.