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Assistant Professor Kate O’Neill brought her impressive research, life experiences, and social insight with her when she joined our department in fall 2024. “It feels like yesterday,” she said. She earned a PhD from the University of Washington with her dissertation research on the sex composition of adolescent peer groups, crime, and occupational selection. Along the way to becoming a professor, she took a winding path through academic life in the social sciences and related professions that enrich her teaching and research at the University of Iowa.

After teaching English in South Korea, Professor O’Neill went to England, studying international aspects of crime at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and picking up a Masters degree. Back in the USA, she worked in consulting and nonprofit organizations in Washington, DC.

She spent three years working and volunteering with a nonprofit organization teaching anger management to men convicted of domestic violence, which is an intriguing example of applied sociology. “I feel lucky I was able to do it,” she said. It was a restorative justice non-profit, so the goal was to help men improve their personal relationships. It also gave her the opportunity to apply research on gender to rewrite some of the teaching material, which had contained outdated ideas about women being more emotionally needy than men. “Telling men that their partners, who in most cases were the victims of their violence, were the needy ones was just so crazy to me.” She realized that to teach effectively meant first learning how her students understood a difficult situation. Only then could she reframe new knowledge to make it useful to them.

While the work was challenging and rewarding, she grew restless. “I looked back at what I’d been up to, and my favorite parts were always learning and teaching,” she said. That insight prompted her move to the University of Washington for more study, teaching, and research. There she worked with Professor Ross Matsueda, who specializes in social psychology and criminology, two of the main areas of strength in our department. Not coincidentally, he was a professor here at Iowa from 1993 to 1998. Kate O’Neill’s work as a graduate student at the University of Washington included research for her dissertation on the impact of mixed-sex peer groups in the lives of teens and young adults.

PhD in hand, she started looking for jobs in the Midwest because she had grown up in Ohio. Like many midwestern teens, future Professor O’Neill was “angsty about being trapped in the Midwest” and wanted to explore the world after college. But she also had a wonderful time at Ohio University in Appalachia and wanted to go back. “Not necessarily to Ohio,” she said, but somewhere to settle in with her family. “Iowa is a good fit for us.”

She loves teaching at the University of Iowa, including her large “Gangs” class and a smaller class on punishment. “Forty-three students is a nice size,” she says. She takes time to learn what her students already know so that she can effectively communicate new knowledge. “That’s been a journey. I’m having fun with it.”

Professor O’Neill enjoys the balance between teaching and research at the University of Iowa. She became fascinated by social research while doing service learning at local schools when she was a senior in high school. Her high school was in an affluent suburb near Kent State University. Kids had all the latest tech and learning materials. Then her volunteer assignment took her to a school twenty minutes away where kids were learning from textbooks written in the 1960s, “before the moon landing.” She entered college wanting to understand inequality and gravitated toward the study of crime because the legal system is a major driver of inequality. During her senior year in college, a professor invited her to assist him on a research project about how forensic technology and CSI is portrayed to the public. “I just really loved it,” and she kept coming back to research, although it would be a few years before she realized that meant she would become a professor.

Her new research extends the work she did on gangs in what have been called “the digital streets” of social media by studying Facebook posts. She says that social media has allowed gang members and everyone else interested in them to communicate freely, and that Reddit is especially good for this. In one forum on Reddit, they are crowdsourcing information to create maps of gang territories, called hoods, mostly disadvantaged neighborhoods with high crime rates. 

“People post these maps and debate about gang territory,” she said. It’s a mix of gang members, gang affiliates, and people who are just curious about gangs, something that would have been impossible 10 years ago. Professor O’Neill is fascinated by how they are talking to each other. “Non-gang members just like rolling up to a street gang and being like, ‘Do you want to talk about where gangs are located in Ghent, Belgium?’” 

She is just now pulling the data, but “her spidey senses are tingling.” She is excited to get deeper into her research on these digital streets. Her students are excited to hear more about it too, as they rapidly fill her courses.  

Professor O’Neill hasn’t lost her urge to connect with others around the world. During her first semester at the University of Iowa in fall 2024, she established an institutional partnership between our department and the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology. She will be travelling to Cambridge when classes end this spring. Her research with a colleague there investigates gun carrying by women at different ages.

Students interested in studying crime, gender, and social psychology have even more reason to flock to the Department of ����vlog�����ۿ� now that Professor Kate O’Neill has joined us.