Faculty updates

Michael Sierra-Arévalo and Jordan Conwell were promoted to Associate Professors of Sociology.

daniel dillon completed a two-year term as the President of the UT Academic Counselors Association, leading a group that represents hundreds of student-facing staff on campus. His Liberal Arts Honors course, World of Gamecraft, was featured by LAH as an exciting and innovative new offering.

Deb Umberson, the Director of the Center on Aging and Population Sciences (CAPS), received a competitive six-year renewal of the P30 Center Grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health.

Javier Auyero: THINGS THAT WORK. Auyero and Allison Lang, Águeda Ortega, Maria Ximena Dávila, and Tomás Capalbo worked with a journalist to write non-fiction stories based on their research.

Jordan Conwell’s National Science Foundation-funded initiative to improve Sociology undergraduates’ career readiness was featured in the College of Liberal Arts’ magazine, Life and Letters. Sociology alumni interested in sharing stories and insights from their career journeys with current Sociology undergraduates are welcome to contact him at jconwell@utexas.edu.

Ken-Hou Lin was awarded the College of Liberal Arts Subvention Grant, with funds that can be used toward translating and publishing Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance in Russian. He is serving as a member of 2025 ASA Program committee and was awarded the 2025-26 COLA Editorial Research Assistantship to assist him as Editor of Socio-Economic Review.

Kim Pernell’s book, Visions of Financial Order, received four awards from sections of the American Sociological Association (Economic Sociology, Culture) and the American Political Science Association (Canadian Politics). It also won the best book award from the interdisciplinary Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. In 2025-2026, Pernell received a core research grant from the Russell Sage Foundation for the project “Evaluating the Impact of Investor Ownership of Childcare Centers.” She was invited to join the editorial boards of Contemporary Sociology and Socio-Economic Review. In 2026, she received the Faculty-Undergraduate Collaborative Research Award in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin for her work advising undergraduate research.

Maya Charrad was awarded the Mahendru Endowed Professorship by the Plan II Honors Program at The University of Texas at Austin. She also received OVPR-COLA Partnership funds in support of scholarship in the Humanities and/or Social Sciences research for her project entitled NAVIGATING: How Feminists Survived Autocracy and Islamic Resurgence in Tunisia.

Mehdi Haghshenas was interviewed by The Daily Texan in “Self-Care Beyond Beauty” (on beauty rituals and expectations in the United States, January 29) and in “Crushing It in Class” (on academic behavior, including the case of a class crush, March 11).

Michael Sierra-Arévalo’s book The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing was discussed as part of the Ethnographic Café’s book series on November 7th. Michael was in conversation with Peter Moskos. He also published a front-page article in Texas Monthly and was quoted in an article published by The Washington Post titled “How a DHS shooting of a third U.S. citizen went unnoticed for months.”