Presser Named Distinguished Humanities Professor
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.