Faculty Spotlight #5 January 30th

The Brown Center invites you to our first Faculty Spotlight of the spring semester on Thursday, January 30th at 4:00 PM in the Carlton Union Building’s Stetson Room. The spotlights series is a showcase of research, creative inquiry, and other scholarly engagement of the campus community. Stop by and learn about the research of our talented Stetson community!

Details about the time and place can be found on Stetson’s Event Calendar

We have changed the format this year and will be having two sessions for thirty minutes each.

The two professors participating in this spotlight are:

Dr. Diane Everett Professor of Sociology,

Department of Sociology and Anthropolgy

“New Cocking” as a Gendered Process of Correctional Officers’ Welcoming of New Peers 

This presentation examines one facet of correctional officers’ (COs’) workplace inclusion. Specifically, it explores how gender, a prison’s custody grade (based on level of security risk), and workplace culture influenced how veteran COs informally welcomed new ones upon entry to their new workplace through the mild hazing ritual of “new cocking.” Based on in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with 27 COs at a higher-custody men’s prison and at a lower-custody men’s prison, I discuss how COs viewed new cocking and how and why COs’ involvement in new cocking differed between female and male COs, the prisons’ custody levels, and their workplace cultures. In the process, I describe the gendered nature and outcomes of new cocking as a means of welcoming COs at men’s prisons. In general, the study’s findings reinforce those of previous studies about the nature of CO as a male-dominated occupation and men’s prisons as masculinized organizations. The additional findings that a prison’s custody grade and its workplace culture affect new officers’ welcoming underscores the need to analyze the factors that can heighten or attenuate the masculinized aspects of COs’ work in men’s prisons.   

Dr. Diane D. Everett, Professor of Sociology, earned her B.A. from Millsaps College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University.  Since joining Stetson University, she has served in numerous leadership roles, including Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, co-chair of the Council of Undergraduate Associate Deans, co-chair of Provost Search Committee, Chair of the Faculty Senate, Interim Chair of the Department of Integrative Health Science (now, Health Sciences), Director of the Stetson Institute for Social Research, and Chair of the Tenure and Promotion Review Task Force.  She is currently serving as the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Provost Faculty Fellow for Academic Advising, and the Coordinator of the Social Science major.  

Diane’s areas of specialization include gender, work, higher education, and applied social research.  She enjoys mentoring undergraduates and has co-presented professional presentations and co-authored articles with students, as well as with faculty and staff colleagues.  Her philosophy of undergraduate education is reflected in one of her favorite quotations: “Education is not making a living; it’s making a life.”


Dr. Chris Jimenez – Assistant Professor of English

Department of English

Homoglyphs, Letter Shapes, and the Cultural Politics of Character Encoding Standards

In this spotlight talk, Dr. Jimenez describes and theorizes the features of what is known as a “homoglyph,” a character whose literal or figural shape is nearly identical to and/or easily mistaken for another. Homoglyphs occupy a unique place between the visual representation of scripts and the digital encoding of data—namely, while computers do not “see” homoglyphs yet can identify them easily, humans experience almost entirely the opposite and confuse them for one another. Dr. Jimenez thus explores in this talk the question of when a glyph counts as a glyph (or even as itself), structuring the discussion by examining a recent clash between China and Japan over the representation of Chinese characters and what historical variants should be included in the international standard.

Dr. Chris D. Jimenez is Assistant Professor of English at Stetson. His research examines the discourse of catastrophe in 20th- and 21st-century global Anglophone literature, with interdisciplinary interests in ecocriticism, nuclear criticism, and biopolitics. His main book project, The Exploding Globe, argues that engaging with real and imagined catastrophe has allowed contemporary authors to expand the scale of literature beyond national boundaries to produce a distinctly global aesthetics. To this end and aided by a Penfield Research Fellowship in 2015, Dr. Jimenez traveled to Japan to study nuclear disaster and its global literary representations in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima. Dr. Jimenez also has an abiding interest in the digital humanities and has worked on numerous DH projects, and was the Andrew W. Mellon Price Lab Doctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania from 2016-2017, contributing to the Price Lab’s Mellon Seminars and DH project incubation. These experiences have helped informed Dr. Jimenez’s second book project, A Literary History of Unicode.