Interim Director & Associate Director, Honors Program
(PhD, Duke University, 1999) is a sociologist with interests in the areas of race, class, and gender; inequality; social policy; social control and eugenics; and crime. Her previous research has looked at the impact of neighborhood social disorganization, peer networks, family structures, and school ties on delinquency and crime over the life course. She is currently researching the role of eugenic (involuntary) sterilization in the South as a tool of informal social control, particularly during the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. D'Unger has published in such journals as the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and the Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice on topics such as criminal careers, gender and offending, and feminist criminological theory.
Dr. D'Unger has been recognized for excellence in academic advising by both Georgia Tech and the National Academic Advising Association, and has won teaching awards from both the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and Georgia Tech. She is the past chair of the Division on Women and Crime of the American Society of Criminology.