Scholarship and Teaching
I’m an Emerita Professor of Sociology at Middlebury College, where I worked from 2008-2026. I taught about punishment, deviance & social control, drugs & addiction and celebrity. A few years ago, I started teaching Writing Flash Sociology and Writing the Family, as ways to get students to use creative approaches to the sociological imagination. I’ve also taught sociology in prisons and jails.
My first book “Judging Addicts” examined the history of the social control of addiction in the criminal justice system. More recently, I have looked at drug panics for the role that class and race dynamic play in their depiction.
I also have written about celebrity and how social media interactively constructs deviance and have published articles about celebrity drug scandals.
Though my work is creative now, I was asked to contribute a chapter to Sociology Meets Memoir by Margaret K. Nelson where I write about my turn toward personal writing and how it can be so helpful for teaching academic concepts.
