PhD Students on the Market

Email: emily.bonner@ou.edu

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Summary: Emily R. D. Bonner is a teacher-scholar committed to integrating research into teaching by producing scholarship that engages broad policy questions of consequence for American families. Her research focuses on how economic instability relates to public policy, particularly for households with children. Emily would like to teach the next generation of community thinkers and decision makers and to produce research that informs policies, supports communities, and contributes to the greater understanding of inequality across class, ethnic, racial, and gender lines. 

Emily's dissertation, Capturing Precarity Now: Understanding the Lived Experience of Persistent Insecurity, focuses broadly on precarity as it relates to class inequality in the United States, particularly for households with children. Precarity primarily refers to the experience of individuals who lack stable life conditions, including employment, income, social support networks, and access to mental health care. She has developed a precarity index to measure the holistic experience of precarity since the COVID-19 pandemic; her research also focuses on how families adapt and resist the causes of precarity in expressions of resiliency, using PhotoVoice as a data collection tool.

As a public-facing sociologist and mixed methods researcher, Emily also produced research on the effects of grocery taxation on food insecurity, published in Sociology Compass and which won the University’s 3MT competition (click here to view her presentation). Emily was able to share these results with local lawmakers, in support for the abolishment of state-level grocery tax. In a rare win for social science research, in August of 2024, Oklahoma lawmakers did abolish the state grocery tax. Emily--and the people of Oklahoma--experienced the power of producing and sharing research that supports policy change that address structural inequalities. This issue is being challenged even today in those states that still maintain regressive grocery taxation policy as households in America continue to experience rising grocery costs, highlighting the importance of her public-facing research approach.

Through her experiences at the University of Oklahoma, she has developed relationships in and outside the university community to bring an interdisciplinary lens to both her research and teaching. OU’s Center for Social Justice honored Emily’s dedication to community engagement and public sociology, making her the 2025 recipient of the Student Commitment to Social Justice Award. 

Research Interests: Class/Structural Inequality, Race & Ethnicity, Family, Quantitative/Mixed Methods

Dissertation Title: Capturing Precarity Now: Understanding the Lived Experience of Persistent Insecurity (expected Spring 2026)

Dissertation Committee: Loretta Bass (chair), Thomas Burns, B. Mitchell Peck, Sam Perry and Christina Miller

Email: afrost@ou.edu

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Summary: Ami Mariko Hood Frost’s research has a substantive foundation in families and gender. Focusing primarily on partnering and parenting, her current projects examine partnering across social boundaries such as education and race, gender ideology and relationship quality, and parenting dynamics on child well-being. Ami utilizes quantitative methods and nationally representative data to identify the complex interplay between social structures and individual interactions. Her dissertation, The Life Course of Marriage: Temporal Effects of Marriage and Marital Change, analyzes not just how the lives of married people might differ from those of single or divorced individuals, but also when such effects tend to manifest. Ami has published in journals such as Child Abuse and Neglect and Journal of Family Psychology. Through her work, Ami seeks to identify the stratified experiences of different types of couples and families, and to shed light on the stratifying effects of family dynamics, structures, and policies. Ami serves as co-chair of the Family, Aging, and Youth division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) and the president of Dialogues of Contemporary Sociology at OU.

Research Interests: Relationship quality, marriage & partnering, parenting & child outcomes, gender ideology, quantitative methods, longitudinal analyses

Dissertation Title: The Life Course of Marriage: Temporal Effects of Marriage and Marital Change (expected Spring 2026)

Dissertation Committee: Ann Beutel (chair), Andrea Benjamin, Samuel Perry, Cyrus Schleifer, Dan Wang

Email: dkschmidgall@ou.edu

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Summary: Darci K. Schmidgall’s research draws from gender studies, criminology, critical perspectives on ethno-racial and class-based hierarchies, and the sociology of politics and religion to address abortion criminalization. Her work explores the rapidly changing legal landscape in the United States post-Dobbs, analyzing causes and consequences of the punitive shift in the Overton Window around abortion policy, and situating the religious ethno-authoritarian reproductive control efforts at work in the contemporary U.S. within broader historical and transnational trends. She has published in journals such as Social Problems, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and The Sociological Quarterly, and currently has multiple projects under review, including a solo-authored piece conditionally accepted at Social Science Research, an outlet with a 5% acceptance rate. She has extensive teaching experience in a variety of courses at diverse institutions serving diverse student bodies, delivering engaging instruction of introductory to upper-division courses, including core and capstone courses. She is currently mentoring a team of undergraduate students in an original research project entitled: "White before Woman, Race before Gender? Theorizing Intersectionality from a Systematic Review of Gender Non-Findings in Christian Nationalism Research," and also collaborates with a number of transdisciplinary scholars on a variety of timely and compelling research projects. She is the 2025 recipient of the Beth B. Hess award, a national award given by Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), in conjunction with Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), in recognition both of the significant barriers she has overcome as a first-generation college student and of contributions she has made in the forms of scholarship and service. She founded the Qualitative Methods Lab at the University of Oklahoma, serves as the community liaison for the LGBTQ Research and Engagement Collective, and was selected as a 2025 Religion and Ethics Faculty Seminar participant by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Research Interests: Reproductive Justice, Gender, Criminology, White Christian Nationalism, and Mixed Methodologies

Dissertation Title: 
Gestating Tyranny: The Social Structure of Abortion Attitudes, Abortion Criminalization, and Anti-Abortion Activism in Post-Dobbs America.
(Spring 2026 expected)

Dissertation Committee: Samuel L. Perry (chair),  Stephanie Burge, Trina Hope, Meredith G. F. Worthen

Email: taceyshurtliff@ou.edu

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Summary: Tacey M. Shurtliff is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. Her research investigates how social institutions—particularly schools and the criminal legal system—shape adolescent development and perpetuate racial and gender inequality. Guided by the central question of how institutions influence adolescent life outcomes, her work spans the areas of criminology, education, family, and race/ethnicity. Her dissertation, Discipline Disrupted: School Punishment, Institutional Control, and Racial Inequality in the Wake of COVID-19, examines how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted exclusionary discipline in U.S. schools and reconfigured institutional power. Using nationally representative data, she analyzes how learning modalities (remote, hybrid, in-person) influenced racial disparities in school punishment and whether institutional responses shifted toward criminalization (e.g., suspensions, expulsions, arrests) or medicalization (e.g., counseling, mental health interventions). More broadly, her work explores how crises reshape educational inequality and how institutions reproduce disadvantage through discipline, control, and surveillance. Beyond her dissertation, Tacey has published in the Journal of Criminal Justice and the Journal of Child and Family Studies. Her research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) has shown how early adversity influences adolescent delinquency and adult caregiving, with differential effects across racial and ethnic groups. Collectively, her work emphasizes how inequality is reproduced across contexts and across time, with particular consequences for marginalized youth. Tacey also serves as the graduate fellow with the Carceral Studies Consortium, where she leads initiatives to expand student engagement in interdisciplinary, justice-focused scholarship.

Research Interests: criminology/criminal justice; race/ethnicity; adolescence; education and school discipline; social control; institutional inequality

Dissertation Title: 
Discipline Disrupted: School Punishment, Institutional Control, and Racial Inequality in the Wake of COVID-19.
(Spring 2026 expected)

Dissertation Committee: Julie Gerlinger (Chair), Stephanie Burge, Ian Carrillo, Jenny Sperling