Message from the Department Head
Welcome! The Department of Sociology has had a renewing and deliberative year of department growth and dedication.
This academic fall and spring we welcome two new faculty members, Assistant Professor Aryana Soliz and Associate Professor Jennifer Sims, who bring with them great knowledge, energy, and craft. Soliz’s expertise in transportation and disabilities scholarship and Sims’s command of critical race and ethnic studies both exemplify the immense talents of all the faculty in the department alongside the gifted students who travel from across the globe to study with us.
I am dutifully holding down the reins of head duties this year while Professor Stephanie Bohon takes a much-deserved sabbatical.
It is a time of much uncertainty and a time that spotlights the need for and importance of sociology. As sociologists we study and teach about the social forces and most pernicious inequities that shape us. We also tackle all the ways society can make our world more just and fair for all.
I am so proud of the work we do, and the skills and talents sociologists bring to the University of Tennessee, the state of Tennessee, the US, and the world.
Thank you for your continued support of our department, the work of sociologists, and all our students who are on their own sociological journeys. These journeys have brought our undergraduate students to law school, graduate degrees, nonprofit management, government service, and business pursuits. They have traveled the world, volunteered time, and sought to help others and their communities.
Our graduate students have conducted cutting-edge research, mentored and taught undergraduates, and went on to impactful work in universities, nonprofits, government offices, and research institutes. We are so proud of all of them and honored they made sociology and the University of Tennessee their academic homes.
Please join us in community this year as we support each other, cultivate the power of the sociological imagination, and work to build a more just world.
Michelle Christian
Department of Sociology
Executive Associate Head,
Associate Professor