Welcome to the UK Department of Sociology
The Department of Sociology has 18 faculty members with full appointments in the College of Arts and Sciences. Our graduate faculty also includes 7 sociologists with full or partial appointments in the College of Agriculture’s Department of Community and Leadership Development.
The Department of Sociology offers an undergraduate major and minor, through which students gain sociological knowledge that they can apply in seeking solutions to local, state, national and international problems. The Department also offers an undergraduate minor in criminology that prepares students for law school as well as a variety careers in advocacy and law-related fields. Sociology is also one of the core departments contributing to the Population Health major in which students develop expertise in global health, inequalities in health and illness, health ecologies, and health care services and systems. The graduate program in Sociology offers a Ph.D. degree with training in both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.
Faculty research and teaching specialties include the areas of crime, law, and deviance; global work, organizations, and politics; rural and environmental sociology and Appalachian studies; and the sociology of health and illness. The faculty have interests that span the globe with research being conducted in Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, and Asia. The faculty also have joint appointments or are affiliated with many of the interdisciplinary research centers and programs on campus, including the Center on Drug and Alcohol Research (CDAR), the Children at Risk Research Group, the Quantitative Initiative for Policy and Social Research (QIPSR), the Appalachia Center, the Asia Center, and the Center for Research on Violence Against Women.
We invite you to explore our web pages to learn more about our mission; our undergraduate and graduate programs; our research and publications; and our community engagement activities.
Claire M. Renzetti
Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology
Judi Conway Patton Endowed Chair for Studies of Violence against Women
