Jeffery Dennis, Department of Sociology and Corrections

Hometown

• Rock Island, Illinois

Schools

• Augustana College
• Indiana University
• University of Southern California
• SUNY Stony Brook

I am available for

• Email conversations
• Zoom room conversations

Why I want to be a Maverick Firsts Advocate

No one in my family had ever gone to college, so I never considered it until my high school teachers started assuming that I would go. I was completely clueless about things like ACT tests, campus visits, and scholarships; I almost applied to graduate school, figuring that it was for high school graduates. And once I got to college (as an undergraduate), everyone assumed that I knew all of the procedures and protocols from alumni parents or older siblings, so I didn’t get much help. Hopefully being an advocate will allow me to make things easier for the new generation of first-generation college students.

What do I teach and research

Teach

• criminology
• criminal justice
• juvenile delinquency
• drugs and society
• the history of prisons and punishment

Research

• LGBT issues in criminal justice, including LGBT delinquents
• homophobia in the criminal justice system
• mass media representation of LGBT criminals and villains

Unique things about me

I took every language that my undergraduate college offered: Spanish, French, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, and Swedish. Since then, I’ve also studied Mandarin, Arabic, and Finnish. But I can only hold a reasonably good conversation in Spanish and French. Although I’m a criminologist, about 10 years ago I published several articles on television cartoons that are still getting me citations in Wikipedia and interview requests.