William Pridemore, a faculty member at the University of Georgia, has been appointed as the first Marienthal Professor in Sociology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. The establishment of this professorship was sanctioned by the Georgia Board of Regents in the autumn of 2024.

Currently, Pridemore serves as the Franklin Professor and leads the UGA department of sociology within the Franklin College. He is a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society of Criminology. Pridemore earned his PhD in 2000 from the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany – SUNY, and he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies from 2003 to 2004. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Annual Review of Criminology, a premier journal in the discipline, where he was also a founding Editorial Board member. For more than ten years, he has acted as the American Society of Criminology’s liaison to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has contributed to the revitalization of US News & World Report’s assessment of PhD programs in the Criminology field.

The article Pridemore named inaugural UGA Marienthal Professor was originally published on UGA Today.