Cynthia Cready
Nicole Dash
Elizabeth Esterchild
Gabe Ignatow
Erma Lawson
Ami Moore
Daniel G. Rodeheaver
Rudy Seward
Jackquice Smith-Mahdi
David Williamson
George Yancey
Dale Yeatts
Kevin Yoder
Milan Zafirovski
Cynthia Cready
Dr. Cynthia Cready joined UNT's Department of Sociology in the fall, 2000. She completed her Ph.D. at Texas A&M in 2002. Her dissertation is titled "Black Population Concentration and the Impact of Desegregation on Public School Funding/Spending in the U.S. Nonmetropolitan South" and was funded in part by the Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for Research Related to Education. Dr. Cready has published articles in a variety of journals, including Social Science Quarterly, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Rural Sociology, Journal of Family Issues, The Gerontologist, Health Services Research and The Milbank Quarterly. Dr. Cready teaches many of the undergraduate and graduate level quantitative methods courses and is currently the Chair of the Department's Methods/Statistics Ph.D. Examining Committee.
Most recently Dr. Cready has joined Dr. Yeatts as Co-Principal Investigator of a $191K three-year grant from the Commonwealth Fund to examine the impacts of self-managed work teams on nurse aide attitudes, absenteeism and turnover and on the residents' care. She has been instrumental in formulating the methodologies used, implementing and facilitating nurse aide teams, and working with nursing home administrators. Their grant research has received national attention.
email: creadyc@pacs.unt.edu
Nicole Dash
Nicole Dash joined the UNT Department of Sociology in the Fall of 2002 after receiving her PhD from Florida International University in Miami, FL. Dr. Dash's main research interests are disasters, natural and technological hazards and social vulnerability and inequality. With Dr. Henry (Anthropology) and Dr. Holloway (Rehabilitation Studies), Dr. Dash recently received a National Science Foundation grant to conduct a qualitative study of Hurricane Katrina survivors displaced by the storm. She most often teaches Collective Behavior, Sociology of Disaster, Sociology of Sexuality, Quantitative Methods and Applied Sociology, along with a variety of different graduate seminars.
For more information, see her website at: http://courses.unt.edu/ndash
email: dash@pacs.unt.edu
Elizabeth Esterchild
Dr. (Almquist) Esterchild received her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. Her primary area of interest is gender and diversity issues. Dr. Esterchild has published a number of books and articles that have received wide national recognition. This includes Minorities, Gender and Work and Sociology: Women, Men and Society.
Dr. Esterchild has served as President of the Southwestern Sociological Association, the UNT League for Professional Women, and the Southwestern Social Science Association. She has served in a variety of capacities for the American Sociological Association (e.g. nominations committee, chair of section on sociology of sex and gender). Dr. Esterchild is currently a regents professor at UNT--highlighting her commitment to providing excellence in education. She has served on numerous committees at UNT at all levels ranging from University wide committees (e.g., Women's Studies Advisory Committee) to those directly impacting the Department of Sociology (e.g., Curriculum Committee).
email: esterchild@unt.edu
Gabe Ignatow
Gabe Ignatow received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 2003, and joined UNT's Department of Sociology in the fall of 2007. Prior to joining UNT, he taught as an assistant professor in the sociology department at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, and as a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthroplogy at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
Dr. Ignatow's primary research interests are in the areas of globalization, social movements, cultural sociology, and the sociology of morality. His dissertation concerned the impact of national systems of mass education on environmental social movements and public opinion, and his recent book Transnational Identity Politics and the Environment (Lexington Books 2007) combines his dissertation research with case studies of environmental and cultural heritage movements in Turkey and Lithuania.
Recently, Dr. Ignatow has begun a long-term project on globalization and cultural policy, specifically on the emergence of micro-libraries and reading rooms in developing nations. He has also been active in the area of cultural sociology, and has developed theoretical arguments and methods of empirical research that explicate the internal structuring of systems of cultural symbols, and the ways in which such systems are rooted in and given shape by cognitive, bodily, and social processes. He is currently at work on a study exploring how people suffering from eating disorders make use of the cultural resources available to them to make major life changes. The data for this project are from religious and secular on-line eating disorder support groups. For more details, including his CV and list of publications, see Dr. Ignatow's home page at: http://ignatow.blogspot.com
Erma Lawson
Dr. Erma Lawson received her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 1990. She received an R.N. from Howard University in 1976. Dr. Lawson joined the UNT faculty in 1996. Prior to joining UNT, Dr. Lawson was an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Behavioral Science at the University of Kentucky prior to joining the faculty at UNT. Dr. Lawson has been very productive since joining UNT, including publishing multiple articles and a book, receiving a large grant from the March of Dimes, and becoming the Director of the joint MPH/PhD program.
Dr. Lawson's primary interests are in the field of Medical Sociology and Marriage and the Family. In the area of medical sociology, recent publications include "Prenatal Maternal Blood Pressure Response to Stress Predicts Birthweight, Gestational Age, and Fetal Weight Gain," in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology; and "Social Correlates of Black Women's Health Status," in The Black Family: Essays and Studies. In the area of marriage and the family recent publications include "Black Men's Perceptions of Divorce-Related Stressors and Strategies for Coping with Divorce: An Exploratory Study;" "Black Men After Divorce: How Do They Cope?," and her recently published book, Shattered Marriages: Black Men and Divorce (Sage Publications, 1999)
Dr. Lawson's funded research includes funds from the March of Dimes for the project "The Evaluation of a Motivational Smoking Intervention in a Texas Prenatal Clinic" ($79,000), and "The Evaluation of a Motivational Smoking Intervention in Kentucky Appalachian and Urban Prenatal Clinics," ($100,000) by the Kentucky Tobacco and Health Institute.
Recent presentations include "The Medicalization of Childbirth in Zimbabwe," at the Southern Sociological Meetings; "Economic Status and Race-Based Inequality as Risk Factors in the Health of Black Women," at the Association of Social and Behavioral Scientists; and "The Importance of Psychological Abuse in the Helath Status of Black Women," at the International Black Women's Congress (invited Keynote Speaker).
Dr. Lawson took leave in 2000 to attend Harvard University's School of Public Health, Division of Public Health Practice and to collaborate with Harvard faculty. They are working on several projects including work on (1) gestational stress and infant outcomes, (2) gestational battering and infant outcomes, and (3) health outcomes of siblings who experience a murder of a family member.
email: elawson@pacs.unt.edu
Ami Moore
Dr Ami R. Moore joined the faculty at UNT in 2001. She received her Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University in 2000. Ami Moore’s research interests include social demography, HIV/AIDS related issues, women’s health, gender and family, and African immigrants in the US. She teaches courses in Demography (both graduate and undergraduate levels) as well as in Sociology. She recently received a Fulbright HIV/AIDS grant to study informal caregiving to children with HIV/AIDS in Togo. She was in Togo from July to December 2006.
email: moorea@pacs.unt.edu
Daniel G. Rodeheaver
Current Research:
The Sociopolitical Ecology and Transformation of Nation-States
The Sociopolitical Characteristics of the Distribution of Environmental Contaminants
email: rodeheav@pacs.unt.edu
Rudy Seward
Dr. Rudy Ray Seward is Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, and Associate Chair. He teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses including the Honors Seminar in Sociology. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in 1974.
His research and teaching specialties include families, parents with a focus on fathers, employment and families, and social research methods. Studying the family combines his love of history and interest in how larger social forces impact the daily lives of people. He has developed an international reputation for his examination of the impact of family policies and benefits on parents, especially fathers, after a child is born. His research with colleagues in Ireland, Sweden, and the United States have been published in journal articles and book chapters.
email: seward@pacs.unt.edu
Jackquice Smith-Mahdi
Jackquice Smith-Mahdi, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at the Dallas Campus. She teaches courses a variety of courses within the department. However, her most preferred course are in deviance, theory, research methods, and race & ethnic studies. Dr. Smith-Mahdi joined University of North Texas Dallas Campus in 2006 after 3 years at Washburn University University’s Criminal Justice Department. Dr. Smith-Mahdi received her doctorate in Sociology from Oklahoma State University, where she specialized in Crime and Deviance, and Social Inequality. Some of Dr. Smith-Mahdi’s publications include emphasis on mothers in prison, and perceived discrimination. She can be reached at (972) 780-3088.
email: smithmahdi@pacs.unt.edu
David Williamson
Dr. David A. Williamson (Ph.D. Vanderbilt ‘93) joined the UNT faculty in 1996. His special interests include medical sociology, traditional medicine in Sub-Saharan Africa, developing societies, sociology of religion, and applied theory.
Dr. Williamson has most recently been investigating two areas: (1) theoretical questions surrounding the similarities/differences between the Sociology of Religion and Social Theory (funded research) and (2) more applied questions surrounding the practices of itinerant drug vendors in Ghana, West Africa (in cooperation with the Ghanaian Ministry of Health). Recent publications include: "Health Care Between the Cracks: Itinerant Drug Vendors and HIV-AIDS in West Africa" in the Journal of African Rural and Urban Studies; "Health and Empowerment: Use of Participatory Action Research to Plan Primary Care Services for Older African Americans" in Empowering Communities; and the book Job Satisfaction in Social Services published by Garland Publishing, Inc. More recently, Dr. Williamson has published two chapters on women and development in Africa and "Gender Differences in an Emerging Health Profession" in the Journal of Asian and African Studies.
Funded research includes a recent grant from the John Templeton Foundation entitled "Bridging Voices: A Proposal to Link Orthodox Jewish Women Studying Scientific Theory in Israel and U.S. Students Studying the Sociology of Religion" ($10,000).
Dr. Williamson has regularly sponsored study-abroad trips in Ghana where UNT students explore health care delivery, both traditional and biomedical, as well as economic development. Dr. Williamson also teaches social theory in a master’s degree program in clinical sociology that UNT offers in Jerusalem, Israel, and is working on developing distance education materials in order to extend the potential audience for the master’s degree.
email: davidw@pacs.unt.edu
George Yancey
George Yancey's work deals with the idea that learning how people of different races get along as individuals provides valuable clues as to how racial groups in general may be able to live together. Thus he specializes in the study of interracial romance and multiracial Christian churches. He also has conducted reseach into the changing nature of majority group identity in our society. He has a book coming out that deals with the effects of interracial contact in our society and is working on a book that uses data from an internet website to learn why some people are willing to interracially date.
email: Gyancey@unt.edu
Dale Yeatts
Dr. Yeatts received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He joined the UNT faculty in 1988. His primary areas of study are (1) the study of self-managed work teams (SMWTs) and factors affecting their performance, (2) gerontology with a particular focus on nursing home management, and (3) social theory. Dr. Yeatts has multiple refereed publications and books focused on these issues. For more details, including his vita, see his web page at: http://courses.unt.edu/yeatts
email: yeatts@pacs.unt.edu
Kevin YoderKevin Yoder joined the Department of Sociology in 2003. Prior to his appointment at UNT, he was a postdoctoral trainee at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University. Dr. Yoder earned a Master’s Degree in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Iowa State University. He currently teaches courses in social statistics, research methods, and mental illness, and my research focuses on suicidality and mental illness among homeless adolescents.
email: yoder@pacs.unt.edu
Milan Zafirovski
Milan Zafirovski, Associate Professor, received a doctoral degree in sociology from Florida International University in 1999 (and a doctoral degree in economics abroad). His teaching, research and interests are interdisciplinary and involve a combination of Sociological Theory with substantive areas of specialization such as Economic Sociology, Comparative Political Sociology/Economy, Social Stratification and Change, and Sociology of Culture. He teaches Sociological Theory at the graduate (masters and doctoral) level and Social Stratification, Sociology of Work, Social Problems, Community Organization and other classes at the under-graduate level.
email: zafirom@pacs.unt.edu
