Hi from New College.
I'm Dr. Audrey Sprenger.
I am a sociology professor who prefers to read and write fiction.
I have written The Beauty Parts (2025), a novella that contains all the elements of a Jack Kerouac novel. It is also the scaffolding for LIKE A KEROUAC NOVEL (2026), a critique of David Riesman's classic sociological study on American conformity, The Lonely Crowd (1950). I am also working on a series of essays about Judy Blume, Norma Klein, Ellen Conford, and other American YA fiction writers who published in the 1970s.
Since 1994, I have taught courses on Jack and Riesman and a wide range of other courses in modernist American sociology, interdisciplinary social science, ethnographic research methods, rural economics, and modern Canadian and Indian culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Denver, Purchase College-SUNY and the Universities of North and South Florida.
I have also taught my series of interdisciplinary introductory sociology courses multiple times a semester in a dozen colleges and universities in the United States and abroad, as well as in two maximum security correctional institutions and one small state college in a strawberry field, mostly at night.
The best way to contact me is through the college or university where you are taking a course with me. Everyone else, please use asprenger@ncf.edu.