Faculty Updates

Bob Antonio

Bob Antonio’s “Project 2025 Environmental Policy: Postfactual Ecocatastrophe” appeared in Current Perspectives in Social Theory: The Future of Agency. And, his “Project 2025: Trumpism & the New Conservatism” appeared in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture. He also published article-length encyclopedia essays - “Capitalism in the Interregnum: Reconstructed Social Democracy or Authoritarian Capitalism?” (with Alessandro Bonanno) and “Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)” in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Bob also presented “Prescience & Limits of Habermas’ Legitimation Crisis” at the online Theory Mini-Conference, Mid-South Sociological Society. Although illness prevented his attending ASA, good friends Lukas Szrot and Lauren Langman presented Bob’s papers at a regular ASA session and at the Self & Society ASA preconference.

Joane Nagel and several other colleagues and close friends extended generously much needed help during my serious illness last year. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friend and colleague David Smith, who took me to many doctors’ appointments in the Lawrence area and to the Mayo Clinic in Minn., where he somehow maintained his usual calm demeanor and good humor when a planned three-day visit turned into a more than a two-week hospitalization. His partner Laura Bennetts also gave selflessly and helped enormously. Thank you, colleagues, staff, students, and friends for all the help, moral support, and patience. I have been doing better for several months and hope it persists.

Kelly Chong

Kelly spent her 2024-25 sabbatical year completing her documentary film project on anti-Asian racial trauma and mental health, Invisibility and Rage: Asian Americans, Racial Trauma, and Mental Health. Over the academic year, she also began a new book project on the topic of immigration, assimilation, and disenfranchised grief. She is also working on several journal articles, including an article on AAPI anti-hate experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic and an article on AAPI mental health. During the sabbatical year, Kelly provided a diverse array of services to the profession of sociology.

Brian Donovan

Brian Donovan published an article with former graduate student Anna Poudel about the cult NXIVM (“Trafficking Narratives and the Prosecution of NXIVM”) in a 2024 issue of the Journal of Human Trafficking. Lately, Brian has been engaging with the fandom studies literature and writing about avid Taylor Swift fans. His article about Swift fans who think that the pop star is secretly queer (“The Joy of Gaylor: Sexuality Identity in the Taylor Swift Fandom”) recently appeared in the Journal of Fandom Studies. Brian has presented his work at the Reception Studies conference, the Southwest Popular Culture Association conference, and the MSS. He’s also had the opportunity to give several public presentations about his research on swifties, including talks at the University of Missouri, Johnson County Community College, and the TedX speaker series.

Liz Felix

Liz IS MISSING TEXT

Eric Hanley

Eric Hanley continues to study political behavior in the United States. He recently co-authored an article with David Smith entitled “Authoritarianism from Below: Why and How Donald Trump Follows His Followers” in Current Perspectives in Social Theory. He also presented findings from his research on Big Oil’s discourse on climate change 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 Director of Graduate Studies for the 2024–2025 academic year. He is proud that KU Sociology successfully recruited seven new graduate students, including two international applicants. He also served as Chair of the Section Committee of the American Sociological Association (ASA). During the past academic year, he published four articles: one in Social Science Research (with Yurong Zhang), two in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (with Andrew Kim and Heeyoun Shin, respectively), and one in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World (with Heeyoun Shin). In addition, he co-authored a book chapter with Scott Tuttle and published a book review in Contemporary Sociology. He has three additional articles published online ahead of print, including one in American Sociological Review on Asian American education. He is currently working on multiple projects related to Asian Americans and Korean studies and plans to continue focusing on these areas in the coming years.

Tracey LaPierre

Tracey LaPierre was named Director of the new Health and Society major and continues to serve as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Sociology. She also completed her second year as an Honors Faculty Fellow for the University Honors Program. This Spring she was honored with the 2025 K. Barbara Schowen Undergraduate Research Mentor Award in recognition of her long-standing commitment to mentoring undergraduate researchers.

New findings from Dr. LaPierre’s research on Home and Community Based Servies in Kansas during the COVID-19 pandemic, were presented this past year at the national Gerontological Society of America meeting and published in Frontiers in Sociology and the Disability and Health Journal. Her co-authors included current graduate student Jennifer Babitzke and former graduate students Darcy Sullivan and Carrie Wendel-Hummell. Dr. LaPierre also collaborated with UMKC researchers on an evaluation of a peer recovery coach program for Opioid Use Disorder, with findings published in the journal Healthcare and presented at AcademyHealth.

Kevin McCannon

Kevin McCannon, who had largely been teaching at the Edwards Campus in Overland Park, KS, for several years, is fully at the Lawrence campus and focusing his teaching on the health curriculum, with a sprinkling of crime and punishment and social psychology here and there. He is also going to be the Assistant Director for the new interdisciplinary Health and Society major in Sociology. This is an exciting new opportunity to connect more students to the world of sociology. 

Kevin hopes to extend something he has done for his Death and Dying course to the broader student community by holding the first Death Café on the Lawrence campus this Fall. Death Café provides a chance for people to come together in a judgement-free space to talk and share stories about all things death, with snacks. 

Finally, he wants to share good news about a recent graduate of the undergraduate program, Akiko Sato, who just completed her MSc in Gerontology: Research from University of Southampton in the UK. She aspires to help older adults at risk for isolation remain connected to their communities. Aki’s hard work and dedication has taken her to this important milestone and will serve her well when she pursues a PhD in gerontology.

Joane Nagel

The nature of sociology as a critical discipline shapes the work of faculty and students in our department. Our disciplinary ethos is shared by all of you who have been a part of KU Sociology over the years. The questions we ask and the answers we offer are not particularly welcome in the current political atmosphere of doubt and denial. Disavowing the reality of inequalities of race, class, gender, and age does not eliminate or even mask them, but the renunciations motivate our commitment to documenting and understanding these issues. This past year I revisited the feminine and masculine dimensions of our existential environmental crisis in the second edition of Gender & Climate Change: Impacts, Science, Policy, about to be published by Routledge. Next year I will be working on a new edition of Race, Ethnicity & Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers for Edward Elgar. Neither of these topics will make sociology more palatable to contemporary critics of academia, so I am looking forward to continuing work in both areas. 

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 Azerbaijani national identity and the Karabakh War at the Annual Meeting of the Central Slavic Conference, as well as a paper on Azerbaijani IDP and refugee resettlement under the policy of “The Great Return,” and she continues 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 prior Fulbright Scholar Award in Azerbaijan, Mehrangiz returned to Azerbaijan again during May and June to continue her research pertaining to gender issues in Azerbaijan, both in contemporary and social historical contexts. 

Argun Saatcioglu

Argun IS MISSING TEXT

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. He spent the past year as the president for the Southern Demographic Association, where he helped to organize the successful 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 series of events to develop collaborations across KU and the region this upcoming year, as well as increased student involvement in the KPC. 

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 focused on Women’s Health 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 recently completed several papers and book chapters focused on: changing time use and sleep patterns in the U.S.; the role of greenspace on childhood asthma; the empirical links between neighborhood factors and health behaviors; and the contributions of socioeconomic status to health behaviors. Saint Onge is looking forward to an upcoming sabbatical in Spring 2026. 

David Smith

In the past year, while teaching a graduate seminar and several undergraduate honors courses, David Smith chaired a successful dissertation proposal defense, a graduate Area Studies committee, and four ongoing PhD committees. He published two journal articles on authoritarianism (one in collaboration with Professor Eric Hanley) and completed an invited chapter on T. W. Adorno and David Riesman that will appear later this year in an anthology edited by Peter Kivisto. The collaborative article on authoritarianism led to published interviews in the San Francisco Chronicle and a Danish newspaper, Weekendavisen.  

Smith also co-organized a theory session at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association with Ros Bologh and Jeff Halley, and presented papers at meetings of the International Social Theory Consortium (by Zoom) and the Midwest Sociological Society (in person). He was interviewed on a number of podcasts and gave a colloquium presentation to the Sociology Department. In spring 2025, he served as interim chair of the department's Personnel Committee, overseeing several faculty progress reviews to satisfy College requirements, while continuing to serve as chair of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter at KU and as an elected member of the ASA's History of Sociology and Social Thought Section council. 

As an outgrowth of his work for the editorial board of Rosa Luxemburg's Complete Works, Smith also joined with Helen Scott and Peter Hudis to submit a proposal to the now defunded National Endowment for the Humanities.

Paul Stock

This past year went so fast with a full load of teaching about environmental and food issues, particularly in the spring as key institutions of the classes like the EPA and USAID underwent historical reorganizations. The daily news made for wonderful teaching moments and created a few more new sociologists according to their end-of-semester reflections.

This summer I am excited to take part in organizing and presenting in a session at the 5th International Sociological Association Forum meeting in Rabat, Morocco. Relatedly, I have been asked to be a mentor at the pre-conference for the ISA/European Society of Rural Sociology for graduate students in Paris, France.

Research-wise, I look forward to whether an NSF grant focused on regenerative agriculture with wheat and rice farmers with colleagues in Nebraska, Kansas, and Arkansas will survive the changes in the funding landscape.

Lisa-Marie Wright

Lisa-Marie Wright has enjoyed another rewarding year teaching the introductory Elements of Sociology course. Over the past year, she has had great fulfillment mentoring several students as they pursue their educational and professional goals. She also kicked off the Fall 2024 semester with her involvement in the Jayhawk Jumpstart program, where she welcomed incoming Freshman, and is looking forward to returning in Fall 2025 to participate in their orientation programming. Professor Wright also taught two required courses: an introductory social research methods course and a graduate level pedagogical seminar. Her most recent phase of pedagogical research, situated within the graduate seminar, analyzes the process of utilizing a multi-dimensional teaching evaluation rubric to engender a more holistic pedagogical training of graduate students. Professor Wright has also continued her research with Dr. Tracey LaPierre on the role of peer review in evaluation of teaching and they presented their findings at the Midwest Sociological Society in Chicago this past Spring.