New Faculty Join UT Sociology in 2023
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.