Faculty Updates
Bob Antonio
Bob Antonio published “After Neoliberalism Social Theory and Sociology in the Interregnum.” The American Sociologist; “Climate Change and Social Theory in the Interregnum” in Michael Long, Michael J. Lynch, and Paul B. Stretesky (eds.) Handbook on Inequality and the Environment; “Social Theory and Climate Change” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Oxford University Press. His “Habermas & Environment: Deliberative Democracy and Naturalism in the Anthropocene” was accepted by Current Perspectives in Social Theory and “Critical Theory in the USA” was accepted to appear in Oliver Kozlarek and Gustavo Leyva (Eds.) Critical Theories in Global Modernity. Springer Publishing. Bob also presented papers at the ASA Self & Society symposium, Mid-South Sociological Association, and Midwest Sociological Association. He especially enjoyed seeing his former PhD Students Mike Lacy and Harland Prechel and other former students and old friends at the Midwest Meetings.
Kelly Chong
While serving her fifth year as chair during the 2023-24 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. At the beginning of 2024, she began the post-production phase of the film and is now in the process of assembling the first cut. She is also working on several journal articles, including on AAPI anti-hate experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic and on AAPI mental health. In the spring 2024 semester, Kelly taught her graduate professionalization seminar and continued to supervise an exceptional group of graduate students. Kelly provided a diverse array of service to KU and to the profession of sociology during the 2023-24 academic year.
Brian Donovan
Brian Donovan published a version of his MSS Presidential Address “The Inevitability and Promise of Historical Sociology” in the Sociological Quarterly. With former graduate student Anna Poudel, Donovan published an article titled “Trafficking Narratives and the Prosecution of NXIVM” in the Journal of Human Trafficking. The article examines legal testimony about gender-based violence in the NXIVM cult and the effectiveness of anti-trafficking laws against cult abuse. This year, Donovan’s research has primarily focused on avid Taylor Swift fans, and he’s paying particular attention to the costs and benefits of so-called parasocial relationships. He has a forthcoming article and book chapter from this work that he’s eager to share. Donovan’s insights on Taylor Swift and her fans have also been featured in Politico, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, USA Today, Business Insider, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s currently the faculty advisor for the KU Swift Society, and he’s teaching a one-credit hour class on the Sociology of Taylor Swift.
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 has an article forthcoming in Current Perspectives in Social Theory entitled “Authoritarianism from Below: Why and How Trump Follows His Followers” (co-authored with David Smith). In addition, he has two articles under review examining Donald Trump’s basis of support within the Latino community. Eric remains active in a number of KU area studies programs, including the Center for Global and International Studies.
ChangHwan Kim
ChangHwan Kim was on sabbatical leave during the Fall 2023 semester. Upon his return, he served as Director of Graduate Studies for the Spring 2024 semester. He is proud that KU Sociology successfully recruited five graduate students this year, all of whom received full financial support. He developed and made progress on several projects during his sabbatical. He completed his three-year term as elected chair of the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the ASA. He now serves on the Section Committee of the ASA. During the last academic year, he published an article entitled "Aging and the Rise in Bottom Income Inequality in Korea" in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility and a book chapter on stratification and economic inequality in South Korea. He participated in several international conferences and was pleased to see that the panel data decomposition method he developed (called "Kim decomposition") was used in several papers.
Kevin McCannon
Kevin has enjoyed some fruitful collaborations this past year. Along with Lisa-Marie Wright (Sociology) and Angie Hendershot (Journalism), Kevin presented preliminary findings of their study on how first-generation non-tenure track faculty manage their sense of belonging and mental wellbeing to a very welcoming audience at MSS in Des Moines. They are expanding their research to continuing generation (parent earned a bachelor’s degree) and tenure line faculty this summer. Also at MSS, Kevin and KU alum Lukas Szrot (Bemidji State) facilitated a lively and inspiring panel discussion teaching as carework that included strategies on navigating challenges in and out of the classroom.
He, Lisa-Marie, and Kelly Sharron completed their inaugural “Teaching Brownbag” series this spring where Sociology faculty and graduate students met over lunch twice a semester to talk about artificial intelligence in the classroom, undergraduate student research, and mental health on campus.
Kevin is also excited to share the news that one of our former undergraduate students, Akiko Sato, was accepted to the Gerontology research graduate programme at the University of Southampton (UK) where she won a Student Union Award for going above and beyond as Gerontology Department Student President to improve student academic experiences. With her hard work and dedication, Aki continues to embody the best of KU Sociology.
Joane Nagel
Joane Nagel is continuing her work on the gendered and sexual dimensions of social life. In light of the importance of social science analyses of climate change, she is at work on a new edition of her Routledge book, Gender and Climate Change: Impacts, Science, and Policy which will be published next year along with an updated version of her article, “Gendered Nations and Institutions” for the second edition of Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism. She is applying her insights about the intersections of ethnicity and sexuality in a new essay on “Ethnosexual Frontiers” for the Encyclopedia on Global Migration and Activism also to be published next year. Joane is looking forward to serving as interim chair of the Sociology department in 2024/25 while Kelly Chong takes a well-deserved sabbatical leave.
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 the Azerbaijani Enlightenment Movement which emerged during the mid to late 1800s at the Annual Meeting of the Central Slavic Conference and another paper, by Zoom, on continuing issues confronting Azerbaijani IDPs and refugees at a professional conference in Azerbaijan. She also 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.
Given Mehrangiz’s extensive and extended engagement in international research, teaching, and service, most notably she was the recipient of the prestigious University of Kansas George and Eleanor Woodyard International Educator Award and presented a lecture on her social historical research on gender in Azerbaijan as part of the award ceremony. In addition, Mehrangiz was recipient of a University of Kansas International Affairs Humanistic Research Grant for archival research in Azerbaijan.
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 spent 2024 serving as the E. Jackson Baur Professorship in Sociology. He currently serves as the president for the Southern Demographic Association for the upcoming year and is looking forward to the annual meeting in Savannah, Georgia. Saint Onge is currently co-directing the Kansas Population Center, an 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 across four universities working on a National Science Foundation grant to model the role of social isolation on Covid-related disease outcomes. He was also recently part of a successful effort to bring a new NIH Center for Biomedical Research Excellence to KU which will bring some exciting opportunities to the Sociology department in the next few years. Professor Saint Onge has spent the past year working on projects related to time intensive health behaviors, health lifestyles, environmental stressors, climate change, and health services research. He is sort of enjoying the new temporary office space in Caruth-Oleary away from Fraser for the summer.
David Smith
David Smith taught his regular graduate and undergraduate courses and chaired a successful dissertation defense by Akbar Amat (with Arienne Dwyer), a successful masters defense by Rafael Pinto Martinez, and a completed Area Studies Dossier by Brenden Oliver. He supervised doctoral study by Tony Feldmann and Christopher Altamura, and successfully sponsored Qixin Pan for the Outstanding Masters Thesis Award from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. He also successfully sponsored Prof. Kevin Anderson of University of California-Santa Barbara for the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Section on the History of Sociology & Social Thought of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
Smith published an article in Critical Sociology, gave invited lectures at William Paterson University in New Jersey and at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Lawrence, and presented papers at the 2023 meeting of the ASA and the 2024 meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society. With Eric Hanley, he co-organized a sociology colloquium (co-sponsored by the Max Kade Center) by Prof. György Szönyi of the University of Szeged in Hungary. Smith also served as a P&T reviewer for Prof. Bart Dean (Anthropology) and served as a Council Member of the History of Sociology & Social Thought Section of the ASA. Since January, he has served as president of the KU chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
Paul Stock
The past school year was a blur of teaching, mentoring, travel, and publishing. In the fall, I taught an overload to conclude the inaugural Kansas Abroad program that concluded with six public presentations by students and their reflections on the future of Kansas and the environment. More on the program available here: https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/6f2fffcea4e8dca2fe13c7ae4d5f89c4/kansas-abroad/index.html
In April, I presented on Kansas Abroad at the Midwest Sociological Society meetings in Des Moines in a session on engaged learning. I was also on a panel on undergraduate mentoring while also supporting an undergraduate and multiple graduate students who presented at their first conference.
I am excited to share a chapter that was recently published with a working group on environmental violence based out of Notre Dame. The Open Access volume Exploring Environmental Violence can be accessed here.
I continue to teach environmental sociology in my SOC 384 class called Environment, Power & Justice as well as agri-food studies in my SOC 386 Sociology of Global Food.
Lisa-Marie Wright
Lisa-Marie Wright continues in her role as instructor for the Introduction to Sociology course and enjoys the opportunity to introduce hundreds of students each semester to sociology. The 2023 Fall semester was particularly interesting as the course saw record levels of enrollment with over 900 students. She also continues to teach two required courses. One course, Introduction to Social Research Methods, allows her to work closely with sociology majors as they develop and hone their methodological skills. The other course, a graduate level seminar, allows her to lead graduate students in the cultivation of their pedagogical techniques and skills. In addition, her service work has allowed her to participate as a representative in the university wide DEIB Campus Council.
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 analysis of the holistic evaluation of graduate student pedagogical training. She also continues her work in 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. During the spring semester, Lisa-Marie presented her work on these projects at the annual Midwest Sociology Society meetings.