Faculty Updates
Bob Antonio
Bob Antonio’s “After Neoliberalism: Social Theory and Sociology in the Interregnum” appeared in American Sociologist and his “Social Theory and Climate Change” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. His review of Campbell and Hall’s What Capitalism Needs: Forgotten Lessons of the Great Economists was published in Contemporary Sociology. Bob also presented a couple papers at the Midwest Sociological Society in Minneapolis and especially enjoyed getting together with former KU PhD grads Mike Lacy, Harland Prechel, Dan Krier, and Lori Wiebold, and many other old friends from KU and elsewhere who attend MSS regularly. This year was highlighted by KU colleague and MSS President Brian Donovan’s brilliant presidential speech which weaved together seamlessly and dynamically the basics of historical sociology with the history of the MSS.
Kelly Chong
During the 2022-23 academic year, Kelly continued her work on her documentary film project on Anti-Asian racism and mental health, Invisibility and Rage: Asian Americans, Racial Trauma, and Mental Health. She has over 30 on-location interviews completed for this project so far and is nearing the end of the production process. The interviews were conducted in Lawrence, Kansas City, New York City, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. She expects to begin the post-production process–putting the film together–in the summer of 2023. Although it has been challenging to work on this film while serving as Chair, this has been one of the most rewarding projects she has ever done. She is also working on a journal article on AAPI anti-hate experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. In Spring 2023 semester, Kelly taught her Sociology of Gender graduate seminar to an exceptional group of graduate students. Kelly continued to provide service to her profession in multiple ways during the 2023-23 academic year.
Brian Donovan
Brian Donovan delivered his Presidential Address, titled “The Inevitability and Promise of Historical Sociology” at the 2023 MSS annual meeting in Minneapolis. He is grateful for the opportunity to serve an organization that has been so important to his academic career but is also looking forward to transitioning out of that leadership role. Donovan’s article "Alopecia and the Social Construction of Race in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era" will be published this year by the Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities. The article examines how a social panic about male baldness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States played a key role in constructing whiteness. Brian is currently researching avid Taylor Swift fans for a new book project. His research on fandom has been covered in the Kansas City Star. He also wrote an op ed for MSNBC about the cultural power of fandom.
Liz Felix
Liz Felix spent her first year at KU continuing her research in the areas of the sociology of mental health, social networks, social psychology, and crime, law, and deviance. She has several research papers and book chapters under review or in progress, and her work was accepted for presentation at both the American Sociological Association and Midwest Sociological Society conferences. Liz enjoyed teaching courses on crime and the sociology of mental illness, as well as serving as a committee member on successful graduate defenses during her first year as a faculty member. In the upcoming academic year, she will continue serving on the Undergraduate Studies Committee, join the editorial board of an ASA Journal (Society and Mental Health), and serve the Midwest Sociological Society as a member of the Publications Committee. Liz is looking forward to her second year in the department.
Eric Hanley
Eric Hanley continues to study political behavior in the United States with a focus on the rise of white nationalism in this country. He recently co-authored a chapter with David Smith entitled “Aggressiveness Unbound: Exploring and Explaining Donald Trump's Base” in The Misadventures of Donald J. Trump: Faux Populism, Identity Politics, and the Struggle for Democracy, which appeared in the summer of 2023. He also presented findings from his research on whites' attitudes towards the Black Lives Matter movement at the annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society. Eric remains active in a number of KU area studies programs, including the Center for Global and International Studies and the Environmental Studies program.
ChangHwan Kim
ChangHwan Kim served as the Director of Graduate Studies during the 2022-23 academic year. He is delighted that KU Sociology has successfully recruited five graduate students this year, all of whom have received full financial support. Professor Kim is particularly proud of three fresh PhDs, Matt Erickson, Andrew Taeho Kim, and Scott Tuttle, whom he supervised. During this period, Professor Kim published four articles in the outlets including the Social Security Bulletin, Journal of Higher Education, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and Social Science Research. He actively engages with the American Sociological Association and various international organizations. Notably, he served as the Chair of the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section of the ASA, and he is an editorial board member of the Sociology of Education and Korean Journal of Sociology. Furthermore, he was elected as a member of the Sections Committee of ASA, representing the large sections. In the upcoming fall of 2023, Professor Kim will embark on a sabbatical leave.
Tracey LaPierre
Dr. LaPierre’s work continues on two externally funded interdisciplinary team based projects: Care and Safety Practices During COVID-19 in Home Based Care and the Kansas City Quality & Value Innovation Consortium (KC QVIC) Opioid Management Project.
Undergraduate Sociology Major Megan Long is gaining valuable research experience as an undergraduate assistant on the Home Care project. Findings from this project related to Self-Directed Care were presented at the Gerontological Society of America Meeting and published in the Journal of Applied Gerontology, including KU graduate Carrie Wendel-Hummell as first author, and two current graduate students, Darcy Sullivan and Jennifer Babitzke, and other project members as co-authors.
Dr. LaPierre was pleased to share findings from two of her projects at the International Sociology Association (ISA) World Congress. From the Home Care project, she presented on the impact of the politicization of COVID on experiences of care and disability in the United States, and from her work on pregnancy decisions among women with disability, she discussed hegemonic ideologies of motherhood as a barrier to fertility among women with disabilities.
Kevin McCannon
Kevin normally teaches at the Edwards campus in Overland Park, but he was happy to teach a class on main campus this past spring. To help support first-generation students, he has partnered with the TRIO program to create a first-generation Faculty Staff Council through the Office of DEIB. He is working with Lisa-Marie Wright (Sociology) and Angie Hendershot (Journalism) to study how first-generation non-tenure track faculty manage their sense of belonging in their department and mental wellbeing. They presented a well-received paper on the study at the Midwest Sociological Society meeting in Minneapolis.
Kevin published “COVID-19 and the American Family Project,” a project from his Principles of Family Sociology course in which students interviewed family members about COVID, on the American Sociological Association’s peer-reviewed teaching resource website, TRAILS. He will be using data students collected to explore how families were ‘doing health’ during the pandemic.
While grading finals, Kevin attended the Sunshine State and Big XII Teaching & Learning Conference in Orlando, FL, and facilitated an interactive session on inclusive teaching practices that featured a “death café” activity from his Death and Dying course used to leverage students’ diverse experiences and strengthen their engagement. His participation was supported by the Christopher H. Haufler Award for KU Core Innovation that was awarded to the Sociology Department based on assessment work from his family sociology course. He and his wife, Cindy, are excited to be building their first house, though they are not sure the pets are going to be as enthusiastic about it.
Joane Nagel
Joane Nagel is continuing her work on the gendered and sexual dimensions of social life. She is refocusing her research on “ethnosexual frontiers” to map the sexualized features of various routes across national boundaries in a forthcoming publication in the Encyclopedia of Global Migration and Activism. In light of the importance of social science analyses of climate change, Joane also continues to examine the intersection of gender, science, and climate change. She outlines some of the ways that gender awareness in climate policy and practice might contribute to slowing the steadily unfolding global environmental emergency in a forthcoming article, “Exposing Men, Inviting Women: Gendered Solutions to the Climate Crisis,” in an edited book, Solving the Climate Crisis: US Social Scientists Speak Out. Her work with undergraduate honors student, Danielle Mullins, was published last year in Social Thought and Research, “Bloody Necessary: Climate Change, Menstruation, and Emergency Planning in Kansas.”
Mehrangiz Najafizadeh
Mehrangiz Najafizadeh has been continuing her research and teaching on global gender issues and continues to be active in various aspects of KU’s area studies programs, including the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Center for Global and International Studies, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Further, Mehrangiz presented a research paper on recent developments in Azerbaijan pertaining to the second Nagorno-Karabakh War at the Annual Meeting of the Central Slavic Conference, and she has continued to serve as a member of the Azerbaijan Steering Committee of the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC) and as a member of the ARISC Grants and Fellowships Advisory Group.
Her on-going research activities include both research on contemporary issues pertaining to Azerbaijanis who were displaced from their homelands during the first Nagorno-Karabakh War and social historical archival research on gender and social change. Following up on her 2021-2022 Fulbright Scholar Award for Azerbaijan, Mehrangiz returned to Azerbaijan this past May to continue her research pertaining to gender issues in Azerbaijan, both in social historical and contemporary contexts. Click here to see a photo of Mehrangiz at a school established for children of families who were displaced by the first Nagorno-Karabakh War.
Argun Saatcioglu
Argun Saatcioglu is excited to be joining the KU Sociology Department as Professor this fall. He has been a KU faculty member since 2007 in the Education Policy Unit at the School of Education and Human Sciences, with a courtesy appointment in Sociology. His scholarly and teaching interests are broadly in the areas of sociology of education, sociology of organizations and work, and quantitative methods, with a principal focus on equity along lines of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and dis/ability. His recent work has appeared in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, American Journal of Sociology, Sociological Inquiry, and Educational Policy. Argun is currently working on two projects, one on how AI-driven work automation in labor markets affects students’ reading and math achievement, the other on how economic and racial inequity in social mobility prospects are related to student views on the utility of schooling and related academic outcomes. He is also the director of the newly formed Center for Research on Education and Work (CREW) under KU’s Institute for Policy & Social Research. Argun is thrilled about the opportunity to continue his career in the Sociology Department.
Jarron Saint Onge
Jarron Saint Onge continues to study the social determinants of health with several ongoing projects examining health lifestyles, rural health disparities, and neighborhood impacts on health behaviors. Saint Onge was promoted to Professor. He was voted president-elect for the Southern Demographic Association for the upcoming year and will serve as the 2023 annual meeting coordinator in San Antonio. This past year also marked the co-founding of the Kansas Population Center (KPC). Saint Onge co-directs the KPC, a new IPSR center focused on integrating big data efforts to study the importance of population processes in the Midwest. The KPC is an institutional member of the Association of Population Centers. Saint Onge looks forward to a set of events to develop collaborations across KU and the region this upcoming year.
This past year he was part of an international team of mathematical biologists and demographers working on a new National Science Foundation grant to model the role of social isolation on Covid-related disease outcomes. Professor Saint Onge has also spent the past year working on projects related to time intensive health behaviors, environmental stressors, climate change, and deliberative democracy. He continues to be the blog editor of the Interdisciplinary Association of Population Health Science.
Kelly Sharron
Kelly Sharron worked on a number of research and pedagogical projects. She presented research at the American Studies Association annual conference and the National Women’s Studies Association annual conference, and gave invited talks at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine and Middlebury College. Sharron also published an essay in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. She received a Research-Intensive Course Grant for SOC 450, and her students presented their research at the 2023 Undergraduate Research Symposium. In her work with the Center for Public Feminism, Sharron helped to open a feminist mini golf course centered around reproductive justice, and develop pedagogical tools including a trivia podcast and escape room.
David Smith
David Smith held the Paul Gibbons Roofe and Helen Waddle Roofe Professorship during the 2022-2023 academic year and delivered the Roofe Lecture in the spring, “Authoritarianism Across the Decades, 1919-2019.” Besides teaching graduate and undergraduate courses, he chaired successful MA defenses by Qixin Pan and Alanna Daniels and a completed Area Studies Dossier by Laura Muñetón, while supervising five PhD theses and a third MA thesis and sponsoring Christopher Altamura's the Mary J. Geis Opportunity Scholarship for Student-Faculty Research. Smith also published two book chapters on classical sociological theory and was awarded a research sabbatical to study the sixteenth century "Charisma Wars" in the fall of 2023. He served as an Elected Council Member of the History of Sociology and Social Thought section of the American Sociological Association and as an Invited Member of the Faculty Senate Retirees Rights and Benefits Committee at KU. Smith also presented papers at conferences in England and Germany and at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association and the Midwest Sociological Society.
Paul Stock
This last academic year has been a full one as we move further away from COVID. While things have been light on the publishing front, there are a few things worth mentioning. I have continued my international work, specifically, with a new project in Indonesia. A couple years ago, during COVID, I served as a virtual visiting professor at the University Teknologi Bandung which is located in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. At the behest of my friend Angga Dwiartama, I visited Indonesia this past March where we interviewed multiple farmers about a new government program encouraging the use of digital technologies in agriculture. While this research is in its early stages, Angga presented the work at the International Sociology Association congress in Melbourne, Australia, in June, and I just finished presenting these early findings at the European Rural Sociology meetings in Rennes, France, in July.
Closer to home, I finished the inaugural Kansas Abroad road trip in June. Kansas Abroad utilizes the state of Kansas as a living laboratory in the spirit of the Chicago School of Sociology and asks the question, what will Kansas’ environmental future look like? To that end, I travelled the state with six students visiting farmers, policy makers, city managers, cotton gin operators, ranchers, and museums to hear their answers. You can see the trip on Instagram at @kansasabroad. This fall, those same students will offer their answers in a semester-long research seminar. Please feel free to support this fully donor-funded initiative.
Fithawee Tzeggai
Fithawee spent the past year furthering his main research agenda and developing a series of related papers. He conducted additional research for his ongoing book project on the role of social scientists in the struggle against separate and unequal education during the 1960s. He was awarded the KU New Faculty Research Development Award to support on-site archival research and data analysis for the project. He presented two papers related to this work at the annual meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society and the Social Science History Association, where he organized a panel discussion on “Expertise and Representations of Racial Inequality.” He wrote two additional article manuscripts on the history of the Coleman Report, a landmark study in the sociology of education, and on the history of randomized field experiments in U.S. social policy evaluation research. Fithawee also spent the year working with an interdisciplinary campus working group supported by the Mellon Foundation, the KU Center for Teaching Excellence, and the Lied Center to develop and promote new strategies for incorporating the performing arts in the classroom to further Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging as a teaching objective.
Lisa-Marie Wright
Lisa-Marie Wright continues in her role introducing hundreds of KU undergraduate students to sociology each semester as instructor for the Introduction to Sociology course. She now regularly teaches the required course, Introduction to Social Research Methods, and enjoys working closely with sociology majors as they develop and hone their methodological skills. During the summer of 2022, she developed an 8-week, online version of Social Research Methods in conjunction with the Center for Online and Distance Learning. To facilitate this process, she was selected to participate in CTE’s Course Design Institute at the end of the Spring 2022 semester. The highlight of the Spring 2023 semester was when Lisa-Marie was the recipient of the Gene A. Budig Teaching Professorship award that recognizes outstanding faculty in the social and behavioral sciences that have demonstrated a commitment to excellence in teaching.
She currently has several research projects in progress, including work with Dr. Tracey LaPierre on the role of peer review in evaluation of teaching and an interdisciplinary collaboration with Dr. Kevin McCannon (Principal Investigator) and Angie Hendershot (Associate Professor of the Practice, Journalism) on how first generation and non-tenure track faculty manage their sense of belonging and well-being.