Faculty Spotlights – 2024
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.