CLAS awards Tony Arnold award to chair of sociology
LAWRENCE – The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas awarded the Tony Arnold Faculty Innovation Award to a professor of sociology who is researching the history of the birth certificate.
William Staples, professor and department chair of the Department of Sociology, received the Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold Faculty Innovation Award for submitting an outstanding General Research Fund proposal.
Staples will receive the $1,200 award to support his research proposal, Documenting the Body; Creating the Self: A Social and Cultural History of the Birth Certificate.
Staples has been a faculty member at KU for 23 years. He received his doctorate in sociology from the University of Southern California in 1987. Staples has received many awards for his research and teaching, including the 2011 Balfour Jeffrey Research Award in Humanities and Social Sciences from the Kansas Board of Regents. He has served as the chair of the sociology department since 2002. He specializes in surveillance studies, social control, historical sociology and cultural sociology.
This fund was established by Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold, a 1987 political science and history graduate. Arnold is the Boehl Chair in Property and Land Use, professor of law, affiliated professor of urban planning and chair of the Center for Land Use and Environmental Responsibility, all at the University of Louisville. Arnold has also served as the Huber Hurst Visiting Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.
Funds for the award are managed by KU Endowment, the independent nonprofit foundation serving as the official fundraising and fund-management organization for KU. Founded in 1891, KU Endowment was the first foundation of its kind at a U.S. public university.
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences enrolls about two-thirds of KU students and encompasses more than 55 departments, programs, centers and the School of the Arts. Nearly half of the students at KU earn their bachelor's degrees from the College. Courses in the College cover hundreds of subjects including history, literature, chemistry, biology, art history, mathematics, anthropology, psychology, foreign language and political science.