Katherine Rowell

Katherine R. Rowell, Ph.D., is a recently retired full-time professor of sociology. She taught sociology at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, for over 28 years. She continues to teach as an adjunct at various colleges and universities in the area.

Dr. Rowell has won numerous awards for teaching excellence: the American Sociological Association Teaching Excellence Award (2012), the United States Outstanding Community College Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement of Scholarship and Education and the Carnegie Foundation in 2005, and the 2005 North Central Sociological Professor of the Year.

She has traveled extensively, including a Fulbright trip in 2003 to South Africa, Botswana, and Swaziland, a peace conference in Mongolia, and recently presented at a Child in City conference in Dublin, Ireland. Her research interests focus on housing issues, including homelessness and eviction. She also researches teacher empathy and speaks regularly on this topic.

She served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Sinclair Community College from 2008 to 2015. She served as the Honors Program Director at Sinclair for two terms. She is active in the Dayton community and is a former chair of the board of the Dayton International Peace Museum.

Dr. Rowell earned a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. in sociology from Ohio State University.

In 2021, she was awarded a Mellon American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship that resulted in the publication of a book and documentary focused on children, eviction, and housing insecurity in the United States. The documentary, Evicting the American Dream, is set to be released in November 2025. In September, she was selected to serve as a Dayton Foundation Del Mar Encore Fellow and will be working with the Fitz Center at the University of Dayton and Learn to Earn on the Montgomery County 2 Gen Collaborative.

• American Sociological Association
• Dayton United for Human Rights
• North Central Sociological Association

• Poverty
• Children's Rights
• Housing
• Eviction
• Homelessness
• Inequality