Faculty, Staff & Students
Tenure-Track Faculty
Littisha Bates
Associate Professor (PhD, Arizona State University), Sociology
150 ARTSCI
Littisha Bates CV
Danielle Bessett
Associate Professor (PhD, New York University), Sociology
1022 Crosley Tower
Bessett's current research projects examine patient experiences of abortion care and disparities in contraceptive access, prenatal care, and infant mortality. Bessett co-leads OPEN, the Ohio Policy Evaluation Network, which conducts rigorous, interdisciplinary research to assess the reproductive health and well-being of Ohioans in the context of federal and state laws, regulations, and policies. Her research has also been supported by the National Science Foundation, among other funders, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Social Science & Medicine, Sociology of Health & Illness, and Women's Health Issues. Bessett's monograph on women's pregnancy experiences, Pregnant with Possibilities: Constructing Normality in Stratified Reproduction, is under contract with New York University Press, and her co-edited volume, Ohio Under Covid, is forthcoming with University of Michigan Press.
Bessett is a past board member of the academic Society of Family Planning, where she led the Junior Fellows Committee, and recently concluded her term as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Sociological Association's Medical Sociology section. She received the 2004 Dr. Mary P. Dole Medical Fellowship from the Mount Holyoke College Alumnae Association; the 2007 Rose Laub Coser Best Dissertation Proposal in Family or Gender Studies from the Eastern Sociological Society; the Cincinnati Women’s Political Caucus’s 2017 Outstanding Achievement Award; the 2021 Society of Family Planning's Mentor Award; and UC's 2021 Faculty Excellence Award from Office of the Provost and Office of Research. She is most proud of her student-initiated honors, including the 2012 “Professor Funnybone” award for funniest Sociology professor and the 2017 UC Women's Center Woman of the Year award for mentoring.
When Bessett is not working, you may find her hiking, knitting, traveling, reading, and/or spending time with friends. An ice cream aficionado, Bessett enthusiastically dances to 80's music and tries to prevent her three mischievous cats from burning through all of their nine lives.
Danielle Bessett CV
Letisha Engracia Cardoso Brown
Asst Professor, Sociology
Crosley Tower
Steve L Carlton-Ford
Professor (PhD, University of Minnesota), Sociology
1009 Crosley Tower
Steve Carlton-Ford CV
Erynn Masi de Casanova
Professor of Sociology & Head of the Sociology Department, (PhD, City University of New York Graduate Center) , Sociology
1017 Crosley Tower
Erynn Masi de Casanova CV
Annulla Linders
Co-Editor of Social Problems (with Earl Wright II and Derrick Brooms), Associate Professor (PhD, SUNY Stony Brook), Sociology
1001 Crosley Tower
Annulla Linders CV
Oneya Fennell Okuwobi
Asst Professor, Sociology
Crosley Tower
Jeffrey M. Timberlake
Professor & Director of Graduate Studies (PhD, University of Chicago), Sociology
1004 Crosley Tower
Jeff Timberlake CV
Educator Faculty
Katherine Castiello Jones
Undergraduate Program Director (PhD, University of Massachusetts-Amherst), Sociology , Sociology
1003 Crosley Tower
In addition to their research, they been writing table-top and live-action role-playing games (larps) for over a decade. Dr. Castiello Jones' games have been featured at festivals such as Indiecade and BlackBox Copenhagen, and she was an invited guest at The Smoke festival in London in 2020.
Visiting Faculty
Chunhui Ren
Assistant Professor - Visiting, Sociology
Crosley Tower
Adjunct Faculty
Amy Cassedy
Research Associate, Center for Epidemiology and Biostatistics; Assistant Professor-Adjunct, Sociology, Sociology
1023 Crosley Tower
Harold F Dawson
Instructor - Adjunct, Sociology
Crosley Tower
Harold has presented his work at gatherings of the North Central Sociological Association. His current research interests include media, popular culture, social movements, sociological theory, and social stratification.
C. James Park
Instructor - Adjunct, Sociology
Crosley Tower
Marcus Christopher Vines
Instructor - Adjunct, Sociology
Crosley Tower
Affiliate Faculty
Michael L. Benson
Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Associate, Sociology
660P Teachers College
Francis T. Cullen
Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus , Sociology
660-O Teachers College
Ashley M Currier
Professor, Department Head of , Sociology
3428E French Hall
Ashley Currier is a sociologist who studies lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) organizing in Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Malawi, Namibia, and South Africa.
Nate Ela
Assistant Professor of Political Science and Law; Faculty Affiliate, Dept. of Sociology, Sociology
1117 Crosley Tower
Ben H. Feldmeyer
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Sociology
660-R Teachers College
Jan Marie Fritz
Professor, Sociology
6213 DAA Addition
Amy C Lind
Taft Research Center Director & Faculty Chair / Mary Ellen Heintz Professor, Sociology
1100 EDWARDS 1 Edwards Center
Dr. Lind's areas of scholarship and teaching include urban studies, global political economy, development and postcolonial studies, Global South/transnational social movements, feminist and queer theory, and studies of neoliberal governance. A qualitative researcher with great interest in people's stories of survival and resistance, she has lived, worked and conducted research in Latin America for over four years, including in Euador, Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela. She is the author of Gendered Paradoxes: Women’s Movements, State Restructuring, and Global Development in Ecuador (Penn State University Press, 2005), and editor of four volumes, including Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance (Routledge, 2010) and Feminist (Im)mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America: Rights, Citizenships and Identities in Transnational Perspective (Ashgate Publishing, 2013, co-edited with Anne Sisson Runyan, Patricia McDermott and Marianne Marchand). Her new book, Constituting the Left Turn: Resignifying Nation, Economy and Family in Postneoliberal Ecuador (with Christine Keating), addresses the cultural, economic, and affective politics of Ecuador's postneoliberal Citizen Revolution. She has held distinguished visiting professor positions in Ecuador, Bolivia and Switzerland and has delivered over fifty invited lectures at institutions around the world.
See her UC Taft Research Center Foreign Correspondent interview here.
Hexuan Liu
Assistant Professor, Sociology
650E Teachers College
Holly Y McGee
Assistant Professor, Sociology
ARTSCI
Presently, Dr. McGee is conducting research for her book, a biographical oral history of South African activist Elizabeth Mafeking. Mafeking was one of four women featured in Dr. McGee's dissertation, “When the Window Closed: Gender, Race, and (Inter)Nationalism, the United States and South Africa, 1920s-1960s,” which put into conversation existent and new scholarship regarding black radical women of the Left in the United States and South Africa during the twentieth century and was primarily concerned with the evolution of women’s protest from localized issues of race-based discrimination to international, anti-colonial protests of the era.
Dr. McGee’s most recent publication credit, “‘It was the wrong time and they just weren’t ready’: Direct-action protest at Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College (AM&N),” appeared as a reprint in Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas, an edited collection on SNCC’s pivotal role in transforming the status of racial discrimination in Arkansas in the 1960s. Additionally, she has forthcoming articles in the fields of local Arkansas history, and South African women's history.
Peter Rehberg
Assoc Professor - Visiting, Sociology
741 Old Chemistry Building
Leila Rodriguez
Associate Professor, Sociology
450 Braunstein Hall
Affiliate faculty, Department of Africana Studies
Affiliate faculty, Department of Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures
Affiliate faculty, Department of Sociology
Affiliate faculty, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies
Collaborator, Central American Population Center (University of Costa Rica)
I am a cultural anthropologist and demographer whose research centers on the local integration dynamics of migrants. A second line of research examines the use of culture as judicial evidence – in the form of anthropological expert testimony – in legal conflicts that involve immigrants and refugees.
Regional interests: Central America, Latin America, U.S.
Olga Sanmiguel-Valderrama
Associate Professor in Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Sociology
3314 French Hall
Born and raised in Colombia, South America, Dr. Sanmiguel-Valderrama practiced law in Colombia for five years before migrating to Canada in her late 20s. Dr. Sanmiguel-Valderrama earned her LLM in international human rights law at the University of Ottawa, where she also worked at the Human Rights Research and Education Center co-directing a women's project with CEMUJER in El Salvador (Central America) funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). In 2004, she graduated with her Ph.D. in Law from Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, where she was also affiliated to CERLAC, The Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean at York University.
On the basis of extensive fieldwork in Colombia, her research and publications examine the contradictions between neoliberal international trade and military aid on the one hand, and respect for individual and collective human rights –in particular labor, environmental, and equality rights for women and racial minorities—on the other hand. These relationships and contradictions are examined through case studies where both trade and human rights laws and practices are in operation: first, the Colombian export-led flower industry. Her upcoming book (2012) is provisionally titled “No Roses Without Thorns: Trade, Militarization, and Human Rights in the Production and Export of Colombian Flowers” (click here to see book prospectus). Second, though the case of NAFTA and undocumented migration of Mexican and Central American into the USA.
Dr. Sanmiguel -Valderrama have published various articles in prestigious international academic journals presenting her research findings on the interrelationship between globalization, international trade, militarism, social reproduction, and human rights from multidisciplinary and transnational anti-racist feminist approaches. Her research have been supported by competitive grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, and the University of Cincinnati Research Council. Professor's Sanmiguel-Valderrama current areas of research and teaching are family-work conflict under globalization, the relationships between military aid, trade, and human rights in Colombia, feminist mothering, women, gender and law, international women's rights, and women's labor rights.
Emeriti Faculty
Jan L. Bending
Professor Emerita, Sociology
Paula J Dubeck
Professor Emeritus, Sociology
T. David Evans
Professor Emeritus, Sociology
David J Maume
Professor Emeritus, Sociology, Sociology
Dave Maume CV
Daisy Quarm
Professor Emerita, Sociology, Sociology
Gerald S Reid
Professor Emeritus, Sociology, Sociology
Phillip Neal Ritchey
Professor Emeritus, Sociology
I am a Sociologist with an extensive background in basic research and policy analysis. I have extensive research and consulting experience and have taught methodology and statistics for over 3 decades. I am very knowledge about programming and data management. I am knowledgeable about methodology (e.g., research designs, sampling, weighting of data with complex designs, and questionnaire construction); structural equation modeling (e.g., confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis, and combined structural equation measurement models); measurement (e.g., modeling based on classical measurement theory and item response theory); and specialized analytical procedures, including simulations, negative binomial and Poisson regression for skewed and truncated distributions, hazard or event history models, random effects modeling, hierarchical linear modeling, individual growth modeling, and path analysis combining OLS and regression coefficients based on non-OLS regression equations. Additionally, I have an extensive background in research reporting and writing.
Staff
Amanda Hogeland
Financial & Program Administrator, Sociology
Crosley Tower
Evajean S O'Neal
Business Administrator, Sociology
1210B Crosley Tower
Graduate Students
Rasha H Aly
Sociology
Hemin Khzir Aziz
Student Worker, Sociology
Email: azizhk@mail.uc.edu
Education
Ph.D. expected 2022. Sociology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH
M.A. 2006. Sociology, Salahaddin University, Erbil, Iraq
B.A. 2000. Sociology, Salahaddin University, Erbil, Iraq
Fields of Expertise
Collective violence, violent protests, policing protest, political vigilantism, Middle East
Work Experience
2017-2020 Lab monitor at the University of Cincinnati
2006-2012 University instructor at the University of Koya, Iraq
2006-2008 Visiting Instructor at the University of Salahaddin, Iraq
2010-2012 Visiting Instructor at the University of Salahaddin, Iraq
2007-2010 Social counselor and Commentator for a Kurdish Journal
2004-2008 Social worker at the Center of Family Care and Counseling, Erbil
2001-2003 High school teacher at Qasrok secondary school, Duhok City.
Teaching
Department of Sociology
Introduction to Sociology, University of Koya
Social Problems, University of Koya
Criminology, University of Salahaddin
Social Psychology, University of Koya
Social Change, University of Salahaddin
Kurdish Society, University of Salahaddin
Department of Psychology
Theories of Counseling, University of Koya
Social Psychology, University of Koya
Educational Planning, University of Koya
Cynthia Lynn Beavin
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
Their current research interests include medical sociology of abortion, non-academic conceptualizations of hard-to-measure indicators like unmet need and unintended pregnancy, and individual control over sexual and reproductive health outcomes within social and medical systems. Cynthia has published in the Lancet Global Health, BMJ Global Health, BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health, Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, and Contraception: X.
Aalap Bommaraju
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
To learn more about me or my work:
e-mail me at bommarap[at]ucmail[dot]uc[dot]edu
or visit aalapbommaraju.com
or look at my Google scholar profile
Sarah Elizabeth Bostic
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
Sarah's research interests include Feminist and Sociological theoretical and qualitative approaches to social stratification and intersections of gender, race, class, and ability. They are interested in working-class processes of knowledge production and dissemination, and specifically who has authority over what is deemed "legitimate knowledge," how this impacts working-class experiences, and how this might function in the divide between white working-class people and the educated elite. They study the discursive ways in which working-class knowledge and experience are devalued as legitimate sources of knowledge. In their master’s thesis, Sarah argues that white working-class men are increasingly alienated from Progressive politics through classist and ableist rhetoric. Continuing this work, Sarah hopes to explore how White Christian Nationalism and the QAnon movement are implicated in white working-class knowledge production.
Sarah's secondary interests involve the body, fatness, disability, and queer studies, and how deviations from the able-bodied, heterosexual, normative body are regulated through biopolitical discourse.
Sarah Bostic's CV
Jeremy Aaron Brenner-Levoy
Graduate Assistant , Sociology
I am a scholar of play and play cultures. My research focuses primarily on how masculinity, whiteness, and heterosexuality structures access to and privilege within play spaces. I am especially interested in using mixed methods research to understand how individuals' experiences are grounded in the experiences of larger communities.
My thesis used a survey and interviews to understand how queer men experience, understand, address, and cope with harassment in online video games. My most recent published work focused on gender, identity, and body in cosplay (a portmanteau of costume and play). I am currently working on multiple papers as part of the Ohio Policy Evaluation Network (OPEN), as well as individual research on queer identity formation and care work in video games. I currently work as a project manager for OPEN’s Experiences of People Seeking Abortion project.
In my spare time, I enjoy reading fantasy books, watching anime, playing video games, and caring for my many plants and cats.
Molly Rose Broscoe
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
Darryl Daniels
Sr Academic Advisor, Sociology
810 D Old Chemistry Building
Mahboobeh Davoodifar
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
Harold F Dawson
Instructor - Adjunct, Sociology
Crosley Tower
Harold has presented his work at gatherings of the North Central Sociological Association. His current research interests include media, popular culture, social movements, sociological theory, and social stratification.
Keri Eason
Senior Academic Advisor and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Sociology
Keri received her B.A. from Northern Kentucky University in 2010. She earned her M.A. in English from Northern Kentucky University in 2013. Keri began her career at Gateway Community & Technical College as an Academic Advisor for the Nursing Program. She worked as an Academic Advisor for the University of Cincinnati's Center for Exploratory Studies between 2015-2017. Keri has taught College Success Skills and Discovering UC. She began the Sociology PhD program at University of Cincinnati in the Fall of 2018.
Kathleen R Gish
Sociology
Kathleen Gish began her career at Sinclair Community College as a Post-Secondary Enrollment Option student in 1998. From there, she pursued a Bachelor's Degree at Wright State University, from which she earned a BA in 2004. From 2005-2007 she attended University of Kentucky, and earned her MA in 2010. Beginning in 2007, Kathleen was an instructor at Sinclair Community College. She has taught Introduction to Sociology, Cultural Diversity, Social Problems, Race & Ethnicity, and the Sociology of Popular Culture with an emphasis on Gastronomy. She began the PhD. program at University of Cincinnati in the Fall of 2013. Her research interests include inequalities, political sociology, social movements, and the sociology of food.
Jacqueline Elizabeth Kitzmiller
Program Coordinator, Sociology
Crosley Tower
Jules Madzia
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
Additionally, I do clinical research on gender-affirming healthcare with the Department of Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and University of Michigan. I recently was Co-Principal Investigator of a community-based needs assessment of Cincinnati's transgender and non-binary community.
Annie Katherine McGhee
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
A native of Cincinnati, OH, Annie received her B.S. in Mathematics from Xavier University in 2019.
Her thesis focused on how those who identify as LGBTQ understand their sex education experiences in private, religiously affiliated high schools.
She currently works for Ohio Policy Evaluation Network on the Patient Experience Survey Study, which focuses on patients’ experiences in seeking abortions in Ohio and surrounding states. Other current projects focus on representations of gender in early cinema and in contempirary country music.
Brittney Shaniece Miles
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
See her full CV here.
Stef Remy Murawsky
Pronouns: they/them/theirs, Sociology
1021 Crosley Tower
Zoe Muzyczka
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
Michael Lawrence Parrish
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
Arti Sandhu
Associate Professor, Sociology
Aronoff Center
Her research is centered on contemporary Indian fashion and related design culture. She is the author of Indian Fashion: Tradition, Innovation, Style (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). She has also published articles on dress and the Indian Diaspora in New Zealand, Indian Streetstyle, the contemporary Indian catwalk, and Indian drag queens. Arti is currently working on research projects relating to the growing discourse around decolonizing fashion studies, the role craft can play in fashioning sustainable design practices and overall well being, and a digital ethnography on social media saree groups.
In addition to her academic research, Arti's artworks, which explore identity and migration, have been exhibited in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, the Netherlands, and India. In 2011 she curated the exhibition ZER0-Waste: Fashion Re-Patterned for the Averill and Bernard Leviton Gallery in Chicago featuring the groundbreaking work of designers and creatives working with sustainable fashion design strategies. Arti has also been the fashion contributor for Arts Illustrated magazine (Chennai) and occasionally writes for an online column for the digital fashion publication the Voice of Fashion.
Kyle Neal Shupe
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
I study queer men's sexual identities, communities, and practices as well as the social organization of desire. In my current work, I explore queer men's cruising strategies and the surveillance and regulation of public sex.
I'm currently the Managing Editor at Social Problems, the official publication for the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
In my free time, I enjoy reading good books and watching bad TV.
Anthony Jerome Stone
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
Kierra Nicole Toney
Graduate Assistant, Sociology
You can learn more about Kierra by visiting her website, KierraNToney.com .
Marcus Christopher Vines
Instructor - Adjunct, Sociology
Crosley Tower