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Presser Named Distinguished Humanities Professor

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We are proud to highlight a UT sociology first: Lois Presser was named Distinguished Professor in the Humanities. The professorship recognizes “extraordinary and ongoing achievements by senior scholars in the humanities.” Presser, who serves as the department’s director of graduate studies and teaches in the area of criminology, has been at UT for her entire academic career and was promoted to professor in 2014. 

Presser is a pioneer in the field of narrative criminology, which unites a growing interdisciplinary and global community of scholars. Narrative criminology considers stories as shaping—legitimizing, motivating, and potentially defying—harmful actions and patterns. Narrative criminologists note the behavioral and ethical consequences of individuals’ and societies’ engagement with narratives. They mount humanist inquiries into those narratives and their constituent elements. Harm is a topic that winds through nearly all of Presser’s work, with her most recent book, Unsaid, focusing on how silence contributes to harm.

Presser has published six books along with dozens of journal articles and book chapters. Her work has been cited more than 2,300 times. She has earned much critical acclaim, for example, for her 2018 book Inside Story, which interrogates the emotional sway of stories that motivate masses of people to endanger and kill others—and look the other way in the face of such harm.

In a review for Diegesis, Luc Herman of Antwerp University points out that Inside Story “offers resounding testimony to the value of interdisciplinarity in the study of narrative.” Philip Smith of Yale University writes, “Presser displays her trademark capacity for expressing intellectually complex ideas in plain English. Inside Story will become a first port of call for both students and established scholars exploring just how culture is tied to violence.”

Presser’s work is the focus of conferences, panels, and workshops throughout the world. She has held appointments as visiting professor of criminology and sociology of law at the University of Oslo, visiting professor at the Danish Centre of Applied Social Science, and visiting research fellow at the University College London. She also received a Fulbright fellowship co-sponsored by Tampere University in Finland.

Shefner Named College’s First-Ever Herbert Family Professor of Excellence

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Professor Jon Shefner was named the Herbert Family Professor of Excellence in August 2023. He is the first scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences to hold this endowed professorship, which recognizes a distinguished career of teaching, research, and service.

He served as head of the department for ten years and has held the title of Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor of Social Science. He was the founding director of the Global Studies Interdisciplinary Program. He is also a Fulbright Scholar whose long and remarkable research record in social justice, social movements, globalization, political economy, and green economic development has made him an internationally recognized and trusted scholar in these areas of sociological inquiry. Much of his research in Latin America and in Southern Appalachia is motivated by his life-long commitment to fairness, diversity, and democratic principles needed to create public policies and educational programs that are effective and just.

Shefner is an award-winning teacher, editor, and author who has written nine books and scores of journal articles and book chapters. His published work is often collaborative, helping graduate students with their professional socialization, and always seeks to highlight the political message in his scholarship. He is also a public-facing scholar, publishing editorials and serving as subject expert for many news stories.

Shefner’s activist and organizing history began while he was a master’s student at Colorado State University in the mid-1980s, where he contributed to organizing against US interventionism in Latin America and led a successful anti-apartheid divestiture campaign. After earning his degree in 1986, Shefner continued his work supporting Central America into the 1990s, followed by a shift in academic and organizing attention to Mexico. He spent nearly two years on the outskirts of Guadalajara studying a community organization struggling for utilities, pavement, and democracy, which led to his book published in 2009, The Illusion of Civil Society. Shefner followed this work with a Fulbright scholarship to Ecuador, where he worked along with one of the main Indigenous opposition social movements, CONAIE.

He recently created the master’s program in applied sociology, which focuses on educating students for action in movements, unions, think tanks, and other applied efforts toward social justice. This program just graduated its first two students and is recruiting more. Shefner is currently the lead on a grant from the Ares Foundation aiming to foster equitable economic development and he serves as senior personnel on several NSF grants. In his grant-funded work, his focus is on inclusion of community organizations and organized labor.

Shefner currently serves as the founding director of the Community-University Research Collaborative Initiative (CURCI), a university and community-wide program that fosters community-engaged research. Now in its second year, the program provides support for faculty across the university to collaborate with community organizations to bring university expertise to meet local needs.

The project was designed by Shefner to bring innovation and collaboration to the larger society to lead to a more just and sustainable future. With the support of Lecturer Lisa East, CURCI is currently working on 12 different projects. He continues to write articles and chapters in the areas of equitable economic development, organizing, and political economy.

Jalata Named Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor

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Professor Asafa Jalata was named the Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor by the College of Arts and Sciences in August 2023. This endowed professorship is given biannually to a faculty member in the college with an exceptional record of research and teaching in the social sciences. The professorship recognizes Jalata’s 32 years on the faculty of the Department of Sociology, along with his affiliations with Global Studies and Africana Studies.

Jalata is originally from Oromia, a region of Africa under the control of Ethiopia. The oppression of the Oromo people and the banning of the Oromo language, followed by years of heavy repression from state forces, left a lasting impression on Jalata, who has dedicated his career to exploring the possibilities for genuine democracy in the nations of the global South.

Jalata works and teaches in the areas of critical race and ethnic studies and political economy and globalization. His research record is substantial, including publishing 15 books—nearly one every two years across his scholarly career. He has also published more than 70 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and works of public sociology explaining social movements, violence, and war in Africa. Works like those produced by Jalata are significant to the American public, which hears too little about Africa and knows little about US-African relations and policies. His ability to dig deeply into Africa’s political, social, and cultural conditions lends to our understanding of the lasting impact of colonialism, imperialism, oppression, and democracy’s frailty.

Jalata is active in the Oromo Studies Association, has served as its president, and edited the Journal of Oromo Studies. This substantial body of work was acknowledged in 2020, when he received the Oromo Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a fellow with the Center for the Study of Social Justice. He serves as the editor-in-chief of Sociology Mind and on the editorial board of the Journal of Pan African Studies and the Journal of World-Systems Research. He is also active in the African Studies Association and the Association of Concerned African Scholars.

New Faculty Join UT Sociology in 2023

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Name: Natasha Patrice Ellis, PhD
Title: Lecturer
Education: Doctorate, University of Tennessee (sociology with a concentration in critical race and ethnic studies and environmental sociology); master’s degree, Clark Atlanta University (sociology); bachelor’s degree (sociology and anthropology), Agnes Scott College
Specialty Area: Ellis has studied and facilitated research in India and West Africa exploring social stratification, the transnational circuits of colorism, skin bleaching, and how digitization of imagery poses a sociological, psychological, and emotional detriment to one’s understanding of self and racial identity.


Name: Joong Won Kim, PhD (he/him/his) 
Title: Lecturer
Education: Doctorate, Virginia Tech; master’s degree, DePaul University; bachelor’s degree, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Specialty Area: Kim’s work can be found in academic peer-reviewed journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, Sociation, Sociological Inquiry, and Sustainability. Kim also serves as a research assistant professor and the communications director at the Laboratory for the Study of Youth Inequality and Justice.


Name: Anthony J. (AJ) Knowles, PhD
Title: Lecturer
Education: Doctorate, University of Tennessee; master’s degree, University of Tennessee; bachelor’s degree, University of Tennessee
Specialty Area: Knowles’s primary research focus pertains to the social and economic effects of technologies and automation, and how the continuous pursuit of higher productivity and efficiency continuously changes the nature of labor in society. 


Name: Prashanth Kuganathan, PhD
Title: Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in Global Studies
Education: Doctorate (Applied Anthropology), Columbia University
Specialty Area: Kuganathan’s current book project combines the ethnography of education with applied linguistics, examining the role of the English language in postcolonial and postwar northern Sri Lanka. The project also studies people’s lives in the Jaffna peninsula who experienced the violent and displacing devastation of the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009).


Name: Bill McClanahan, PhD
Title: Assistant Professor 
Education: Doctorate, University of Essex in Colchester, England
Specialty Area: McClanahan’s research seeks to generate questions surrounding visual and sensory cultures, police, and rurality by interrogating the intersections of violence, ecology, and power. He is a reviews editor at the journal Crime, Media, Culture and serves on the editorial board of Critical Criminology.


Name: Steve McGlamery, PhD
Title: Lecturer
Education: Doctorate, Virginia Tech
Specialty Areas: McGlamery’s work is in race, inequality, religion, whiteness, civil rights movement, religion and race, and race and sports.


Name: Christine Vossler, PhD
Title: Lecturer
Education: Doctorate, University of Tennessee
Specialty Areas: Vossler’s primary research interest pertains to sexual harassment, under the lens of narrative criminology and narrative victimology. Specifically, she studies how offenders communicate their experiences of harmdoing, how victims use narratives to explain and make sense of their experience in the aftermath of victimization, and the impact of sexual harassment on bystanders.

Destine Appointed Humanities Center Fellow

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Shaneda Destine

Assistant Professor Shaneda Destine has been selected for the Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship Program. Destine has a joint appointment in sociology and Africana Studies, and her courses also contribute to UT’s program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Destine earned her PhD in 2017 from Howard University. Since coming to UT, she has been remarkably productive while navigating the challenges of maintaining faculty positions in two departments—challenges made more difficult by COVID-19 and attacks both in the state of Tennessee and nationally on Black lives and the teaching of critical race and ethnic studies. Destine does work that is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, focused on Black safety, Black joy, and Black care. Her work emphasizes the theoretical approaches rooted in intersectionality. Destine’s focus on “safe” environments for Black Americans for protection and equitable treatment is a thread that runs through all of her work, past and future.

As Destine moves forward with work on historical Black landownership, this fellowship at the Humanities Center will be invaluable, for she will have the opportunity to seriously devote her time to this project, which will move her beyond her dissertation work as she approaches tenure.


Jones Recognized for a Career of Service

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Headshot photo of Robert Emmett Jones

Professor Robert Emmett Jones earned the Outstanding Service Award from the College of Arts and Sciences. Jones is a pioneer in our environmental sociology concentration, as only the second faculty member in that area. In this role, Jones was a crucial leader in designing that concentration, building the curriculum and attracting undergraduate and graduate students alike.  

Jones’s pioneering research in human dimensions of ecosystem management, in environmental values and public opinion, and sustainable rural and urban community development influenced the curriculum and energized too many students to count. Yet, Jones’s curricular contributions extend well beyond building his field. He has been a key actor in integrating the Sociology Department’s four concentration areas not just as individual pillars contributing to a robust academic program, but particularly as they provide essential knowledge needed for the pursuit of social justice-oriented scholarship.

Jones has long contributed to the Rural Sociological Society and the Society of Human Ecology. Perhaps most notably, he served as a charter member and organizer of the International Symposium on Society and Resource Management. Jones has played multiple roles in this professional association, from student awards chair, to working on the steering committee and the recruitment committee. The organization’s mission is to build and develop the subfield of environmental sociology as well as promote and engage in collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts to advance societal understanding of the socio-ecological dimensions of environmental degradation and environmental injustice.

Jones has also been a valued reviewer for the National Science Foundation, the US Forest Service, the US Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and dozens of scholarly journals. It is important to note that this groundbreaking research is all in service to entities that are attempting to remediate environmental damage through humane public policy. Wherever UT has innovated in environmental protection and sustainability, Jones has played a key role.


Gill Develops Social Research Workshops

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by Tim Gill

Over the past three years, Assistant Professor Tim Gill developed and organized the UT Social Research Workshop. The purpose of the workshop is to cultivate a space where professors and graduate students can engage in open and constructive discussion about their works-in-progress. The result of such discussions is that scholars can enhance their work and move towards eventual publication.

Students and faculty in the department have attested to the effectiveness and helpfulness of the workshop. Graduate students report that the workshop has been instrumental in assisting them in making sense of the writing and analytical process. Indeed, the demystification of the writing process is one of the guiding principles of the workshop. No book manuscript or research article is ever complete after the first draft. Writing is a process, and we aim to show this through our workshop discussions.

Over the past three years, we have hosted a range of internal and external guests from such places as the University of Michigan, University of California-Los Angeles, the University of Pittsburgh, Yale University, and elsewhere. In addition, we have hosted our own graduate students who have received thorough feedback on their works in progress. For the ensuing two academic years, Gill received a Haines-Morris Grant to continue funding external guests to present and discuss their work, and we look forward to future conversations.

UT Establishes Appalachian Justice Research Center

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by Michelle Brown

UT established the Appalachian Justice Research Center (AJRC) in July 2023, co-directed by sociology Professor Michelle Brown and Professor Wendy A. Bach, College of Law. The AJRC is a trans-disciplinary research and training collaborative dedicated to advancing just and equitable community visions in Appalachia and the Mountain South.

Modeled after clinical legal education, the AJRC leverages university resources to address urgent, protracted, and historically under-addressed issues in the region. The center does this through a community-driven non-extractive research model. Projects begin and end, and begin again, around community priorities and legacies of resilience—specifically those communities most impacted by histories of poverty and violence.

The first wave of the center’s projects will focus on such topics as coal mining reclamation and regulatory law, housing precarity, community safety and participatory defense, as well as just economic transitions in place of prison siting in Appalachia. The center will offer innovative pedagogy, including a core community justice lab, where students work in small teams with multidisciplinary faculty on specific aspects of these problems. The AJRC will bring advanced undergraduates as well as law and graduate students from across campus into the same classroom space around community projects for the first time at UT via this new interdisciplinary program in justice studies, developed collaboratively between the College of Law and the College of Arts and Sciences.

The AJRC is already planning a number of related events in collaboration with departments and colleges across UT. Sociology has long been a campus leader in community engagement initiatives, and the department is excited to be working closely with the College of Law, where the AJRC is housed, to extend that work across the region. Keep your eye on the AJRC!

Faculty Spotlights – 2024

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Jalata Named Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor

Professor Asafa Jalata was named the Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor by the College of Arts and Sciences in August 2023. This endowed professorship is given biannually to a faculty member in the college with an exceptional record of research and teaching in the social sciences. The professorship recognizes Jalata’s 32 years on the faculty of the Department of Sociology, along with his affiliations with Global Studies and Africana Studies.

Jalata is originally from Oromia, a region of Africa under the control of Ethiopia. The oppression of the Oromo people and the banning of the Oromo language, followed by years of heavy repression from state forces, left a lasting impression on Jalata, who has dedicated his career to exploring the possibilities for genuine democracy in the nations of the global South.

Jalata works and teaches in the areas of critical race and ethnic studies and political economy and globalization. His research record is substantial, including publishing 15 books—nearly one every two years across his scholarly career. He has also published more than 70 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and works of public sociology explaining social movements, violence, and war in Africa. Works like those produced by Jalata are significant to the American public, which hears too little about Africa and knows little about US-African relations and policies. His ability to dig deeply into Africa’s political, social, and cultural conditions lends to our understanding of the lasting impact of colonialism, imperialism, oppression, and democracy’s frailty.

Jalata is active in the Oromo Studies Association, has served as its president, and edited the Journal of Oromo Studies. This substantial body of work was acknowledged in 2020, when he received the Oromo Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a fellow with the Center for the Study of Social Justice. He serves as the editor-in-chief of Sociology Mind and on the editorial board of the Journal of Pan African Studies and the Journal of World-Systems Research. He is also active in the African Studies Association and the Association of Concerned African Scholars.


Shefner Named College’s First-Ever Herbert Family Professor of Excellence

Professor Jon Shefner was named the Herbert Family Professor of Excellence in August 2023. He is the first scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences to hold this endowed professorship, which recognizes a distinguished career of teaching, research, and service.

He served as head of the department for ten years and has held the title of Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor of Social Science. He was the founding director of the Global Studies Interdisciplinary Program. He is also a Fulbright Scholar whose long and remarkable research record in social justice, social movements, globalization, political economy, and green economic development has made him an internationally recognized and trusted scholar in these areas of sociological inquiry. Much of his research in Latin America and in Southern Appalachia is motivated by his life-long commitment to fairness, diversity, and democratic principles needed to create public policies and educational programs that are effective and just.

Shefner is an award-winning teacher, editor, and author who has written nine books and scores of journal articles and book chapters. His published work is often collaborative, helping graduate students with their professional socialization, and always seeks to highlight the political message in his scholarship. He is also a public-facing scholar, publishing editorials and serving as subject expert for many news stories.

Shefner’s activist and organizing history began while he was a master’s student at Colorado State University in the mid-1980s, where he contributed to organizing against US interventionism in Latin America and led a successful anti-apartheid divestiture campaign. After earning his degree in 1986, Shefner continued his work supporting Central America into the 1990s, followed by a shift in academic and organizing attention to Mexico. He spent nearly two years on the outskirts of Guadalajara studying a community organization struggling for utilities, pavement, and democracy, which led to his book published in 2009, The Illusion of Civil Society. Shefner followed this work with a Fulbright scholarship to Ecuador, where he worked along with one of the main Indigenous opposition social movements, CONAIE.

He recently created the master’s program in applied sociology, which focuses on educating students for action in movements, unions, think tanks, and other applied efforts toward social justice. This program just graduated its first two students and is recruiting more. Shefner is currently the lead on a grant from the Ares Foundation aiming to foster equitable economic development and he serves as senior personnel on several NSF grants. In his grant-funded work, his focus is on inclusion of community organizations and organized labor.

Shefner currently serves as the founding director of the Community-University Research Collaborative Initiative (CURCI), a university and community-wide program that fosters community-engaged research. Now in its second year, the program provides support for faculty across the university to collaborate with community organizations to bring university expertise to meet local needs.

The project was designed by Shefner to bring innovation and collaboration to the larger society to lead to a more just and sustainable future. With the support of Lecturer Lisa East, CURCI is currently working on 12 different projects. He continues to write articles and chapters in the areas of equitable economic development, organizing, and political economy.


Presser Named Distinguished Humanities Professor

We are proud to highlight a UT sociology first: Professor Lois Presser was named Distinguished Professor in the Humanities. The professorship recognizes “extraordinary and ongoing achievements by senior scholars in the humanities.” Presser, who serves as the department’s director of graduate studies and teaches in the area of criminology, has been at UT for her entire academic career and was promoted to professor in 2014. 

Presser is a pioneer in the field of narrative criminology, which unites a growing interdisciplinary and global community of scholars. Narrative criminology considers stories as shaping—legitimizing, motivating, and potentially defying—harmful actions and patterns. Narrative criminologists note the behavioral and ethical consequences of individuals’ and societies’ engagement with narratives. They mount humanist inquiries into those narratives and their constituent elements. Harm is a topic that winds through nearly all of Presser’s work, with her most recent book, Unsaid, focusing on how silence contributes to harm.

Presser has published six books along with dozens of journal articles and book chapters. Her work has been cited more than 2,300 times. She has earned much critical acclaim, for example, for her 2018 book Inside Story, which interrogates the emotional sway of stories that motivate masses of people to endanger and kill others—and look the other way in the face of such harm.

In a review for Diegesis, Luc Herman of Antwerp University points out that Inside Story “offers resounding testimony to the value of interdisciplinarity in the study of narrative.” Philip Smith of Yale University writes, “Presser displays her trademark capacity for expressing intellectually complex ideas in plain English. Inside Story will become a first port of call for both students and established scholars exploring just how culture is tied to violence.”

Presser’s work is the focus of conferences, panels, and workshops throughout the world. She has held appointments as visiting professor of criminology and sociology of law at the University of Oslo, visiting professor at the Danish Centre of Applied Social Science, and visiting research fellow at the University College London. She also received a Fulbright fellowship co-sponsored by Tampere University in Finland.