Department of Sociology Newsletter - Summer 2025
Message from the Interim Chair
Greetings from the 7th floor of Fraser Hall! It is no secret that the past year has been a difficult time for higher education. Reductions in research funding and shifts in teaching and staffing priorities have complicated our teaching, service, and research missions. KU Sociology faculty, staff, and students have met these challenges with thoughtful and energetic commitment to each other and the foundational principles of the discipline to understand how social processes and structures shape human experience. As a result of KU’s institutional support and our resilience, I am pleased to report that the state of our department is healthy and vibrant. We have added new faculty, admitted new students, and launched a new undergraduate major and concentration. Here is what we have been up to.
In the Fall, 2025, we will welcome two new faculty members to our department. Assistant Professor Elizabeth Anderson (PhD Indiana) is a medical sociologist studying health and healthcare with an emphasis on sexual and reproductive health. Assistant Professor Tyler Myroniuk (PhD Maryland) is a medical sociologist studying health disparities and population health. These two new colleagues are part of a multi-year large-scale NIH Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant focused on improving women’s health. Our inclusion in the COBRE initiative is because of Dr. Jarron Saint Onge’s participation in the leadership team. This project is notable by its prominence in a landscape of highly productive faculty and graduate students whose research successes have continued to place us among the top 40 US graduate Sociology programs ranked by U.S. News & World Report.
We also have good news from our teaching faculty. Dr. Kevin McCannon was promoted to Associate Teaching Professor this year and was awarded the 2024/2025 KU Edwards Campus Faculty Teaching Excellence Award. He and Dr. Lisa-Marie Wright have continued the departmental Teaching Brownbag series with the help of Dr. Kelly Sharron, who will be moving to KU’s Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Department as a tenure-track assistant professor this fall. We are looking forward to Dr. Pam Rooks (PhD Kansas) joining our faculty as a Multi-Term Lecturer.
2025 was the year that KU Sociology became home to a new College degree program. The Health and Society (BA, BGS) major was approved by the Kansas Board of Regents this spring, and we will be welcoming students to our new major in the fall. Kansas Board of Regents’ approval of this new degree demanded the sustained commitment of Undergraduate Studies Director, Dr. Tracey LaPierre, and is another component of KU Sociology’s growing strength in the sociology of health and medicine. This year we also established an undergraduate concentration in Critical Criminology to provide a sociological perspective to students enrolling in KU’s new bachelor’s program in Criminal Justice in the School of Professional Studies (Edwards Campus).
Thanks to the vision of Dr. ChangHwan Kim, Director of Graduate Studies and the leadership of Dr. Fithawee Tzeggai, Colloquium Committee Chair, we have launched a new colloquium series, KU Sociology and Beyond, which features bi-weekly presentations by faculty and graduate students from the department and university. Next year we will venture further beyond KU Sociology to include speakers from outside the university. This outreach will further advance KU’s place in important national dialogues already part of our annual Clark Lecture and graduate student-sponsored annual Blackmar Lecture. The 2024 Clark Lecturer was Dr. Jonathan Metzl (Vanderbilt), “What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms,” and the 2025 Blackmar Lecturer was Dr. Thomas Davidson (Rutgers), “Far-Right Activism, Hate Speech, and Populism: A Computational Analysis of Social Media.”
Our achievements during the past year depended on the generosity and creativity of Sociology department leadership. KU’s recertification by the Higher Learning Commission was accompanied by required degree assessments which took hours of faculty and staff time. Our success resulted from the efforts of Dr. Tracey LaPierre who led the assessment of the Bachelors’ degrees and Dr. ChangHwan Kim who led the assessment of the Master’s and PhD degrees. Personnel Committee Chair, Dr. David Smith, smoothly shepherded pre-tenure and post-tenure reviews through the administrative process, and Dr. Jarron Saint Onge so effectively chaired the Search Committee that we were able to hire not one, but two new medical sociology colleagues. Associate Chair, Dr. Brian Donovan’s navigated the shifting enrollment terrain of KU’s new CORE34 general education requirements; his skill and good humor made it possible for me to weather this year as Interim Chair. The thoughtfulness and talents of these colleagues are a major reason for the Sociology department’s well-known culture of collegiality. We are lucky that they were willing to take time away from their own work to contribute to our shared well-being.
Our graduate program is flourishing as interesting new students continue to choose to study with us. In 2024, we admitted six new graduate students: Hana Blair, Jennifer Buller, Miyabi Kogure, Matheus Romanetto, Abigail Scoville, and Nina Soltero. This diverse and talented cohort joined our continuing students to enhance our graduate courses and contribute to teaching our undergraduates. This fall, 2025, we are pleased to welcome another seven new graduate students into our program: Hameed Bakare, Sarah Bujarski, Rachael Hampton, Xioayan Liang, Tristan McCulloch, Gabriel Patino-Rodriguez, and Grace Price. Our graduate students have been publishing, defending proposals, theses, and dissertations, winning awards, and getting jobs. Seven graduate students completed their degrees this year: Matthew Bettencourt, Kaniz Fatema, Charles Herro, Zahra Mansour, and Rafael Pinto all were awarded MA degrees, and Walter Goettlich and John Kaiser received their PhDs. Congratulations to these new graduates. We are looking forward to hearing about your future successes.
Everything that happens in the Sociology department, from floor to ceiling, office to classroom, individual needs to community building, depends on our staff. Bethany Engel, our Office Manager, makes it look easy to run a department of 17 faculty with different needs and personalities. Bethany’s hard work and consistent good humor is at the heart of the department, and we are grateful for her presence. Jan Emerson, our Administrative Assistant, handles the pressures of unpredictable walk-ins, syllabus wrangling, and last-minute print requests with equanimity and grace. The encyclopedic knowledge and flexibility of our Graduate Program Coordinator, Corinne Butler, keeps student and faculty sanity intact by adeptly steering us through the rules, deadlines, and requirements of graduate degrees. Our two student office assistants, Ellen Stetson and Claire Sprute, brought a sense of fun and efficiency to the main office, and we look forward to welcoming them back next year.
It has been my honor and pleasure this past year to stand in for our Chair, Dr. Kelly Chong. I’ve learned how much complexity and administrative noise have been added to this position since the last time I served in this role. Kelly deserves our congratulations for a successful sabbatical leave and our gratitude for resuming this leadership role for KU Sociology. Best wishes to you all for a long and rejuvenating summer.
Joane Nagel
