Denise Woodall, Ph.D.

Professor Denise Woodall began teaching at the University of North Georgia in 2013. She currently holds the position of Senior Lecturer. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Georgia with substantive areas in Crime, Law, Deviance, and Gender. She earned a Master of Arts degree from the University of Miami, with substantive areas in Criminology and Race. Professor Woodall is a member of the American Society of Criminology and the Georgia Sociological Association. She serves in the Division of Convict Criminology.

Professor Woodall has assisted in research on a number of National Institute on Heath grants exploring the lives of opioid users, older drug users, and women methamphetamine users in the suburbs. She has headed her own research projects studying color-blind racism in media messaging and in college classrooms, the policing of protests, constructions of carceral status identities and their intersections with gender, race, class, and sexual identities, child-reunification experiences with formerly incarcerated mothers, and her most recent research is a feminist examination of formerly incarcerated activists.

Denise volunteers with Mothers Making a Change, a publicly funded residential treatment program for women drug users seeking recovery and custody of their children. She also sits on the Board of Directors for Freedom Club Inc., a recovery clubhouse for young people. Professor Woodall has a long history of activism including co-founding Healthcare-Now Georgia and working on criminal justice policy reform.

She was a media studies major at Kennesaw State University and has 10 years of experience in media including newsroom work at Cable News Network (CNN) and she served as news director for WCHK AM1290 in Canton Georgia. 

Prof Woodall’s goals in teaching are to facilitate the development of students’ sociological imagination and encourage application of their new social analytic skills in their careers and communities.

• Ph.D., Sociology, University of Georgia
• M.A., Sociology, University of Miami
• B.A., Communication, Kennesaw State University

Woodall, Denise 2023 Here She Comes: Twenty-five Years of Women and Racial Minority Under-representation in Convict Criminology. A special edition of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, Twenty-Five Years of Convict Criminology.

Woodall, Denise and Sarah Shannon 2022. Carceral Citizens Rising: Resisting Race, Gender, and Carceral Status Based Oppressions through activism. A special edition of Social Service Review 96(2) 308-352.

Woodall, Denise and Miriam Boeri 2020. “Developing a Penal Abolitionist Application to Drug Treatment Drawing from Insider Perspectives and Lived Experiences.” Humanity & Society 46(1): 78-109.

Boeri, Miriam; Pereira, Elise; Minkova, Alina; Marcato, Kevin; Martinez, Elianne; Woodall, Denise. 2020. "Green Hope: Perspectives on Cannabis from People who Use Opioids" Sociological Inquiry Forthcoming,

Woodall, Denise 2019. “We are All Criminals: The Abolitionist Potential of Remembering.” In Press. Social Justice Special Edition on Penal Abolition.

Woodall, Denise. 2017. "Interrupting Constructions of a Criminalized Other through a Revised Criminal Activities Checklist Classroom Exercise." Teaching Sociology 45(2):161-167.

Arrigo, Bruce and Denise Woodall 2016. Critical Perspectives on Female Offending in Encyclopedia of Women in Crime edited by F. P. Bernat and K. Frailing. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

Woodall, Denise and Miriam Boeri 2014. “When You Got Friends in Low Places, You Stay Low: Social Networks and Access to Needed Resources for Female Methamphetamine Users in Low Income Suburban Communities.”  Journal of Drug Issues 44(3):321-339.

Woodall, Denise 2013. "Challenging Whiteness in Higher Education Classrooms: Context, Content, and Classroom Dynamics," The Journal of Public and Professional Sociology 5:2 Article 8.

Boeri, Miriam, Ben Tyndall, Denise Woodall. 2011. “Suburban Poverty: Barriers to Services and Injury Prevention among Marginalized Women who Use Methamphetamine.” Western Journal of Emergency Medicine 7(3):284-292