Dr. Joseph F. Donnermeyer is a professor emeritus in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from the University of Kentucky, and his B.A. degree in Sociology from Thomas More College in Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky. He currently holds appointments as an adjunct professor with the School of Justice (Faculty of Law) at the Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, AU) and is a Research Associate at the Center on Research on Violence at West Virginia University (Morgantown, USA).
Dr. Donnermeyers specialization is rural criminology. He has conducted research on numerous rural crime topics, including levels of victimization and attitudes toward crime among rural people, the extent and pattern of offending by rural populations, especially the etiology of substance use by rural youth, and the criminology of food and agriculture. He is the founding editor of the on-line journal titled The International Journal of Rural Criminology (OSU Libraries, Knowledge Bank).
Dr. Donnermeyer is the author (co-author) of over 100 peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and books on issues related to rural crime and rural societies. He is a trainer in various executive development and leadership programs through the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police (the Police Executive Leadership Program and the Certified Law Enforcement Executive Program), the Ohio Fire Chiefs Association program on leadership, and other organizations on topics related to community and social change.
With Walter DeKeseredy at West Virginia University, Dr. Donnermeyer is the co-author of Rural Criminology (2014), a monograph in the Critical Criminology Series sponsored by Routledge. He is the editor of Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology (2016), and is currently preparing the Criminology of Food and Agriculture (Routledge). He was recently selected as editor of the Routledge Monograph Series in Rural Criminology.
Dr. Donnermeyer has been the recipient of numerous awards for teaching and advising, including the Excellence in Instruction award of the Rural Sociological Society, the Teaching Award of Merit from Gamma Sigma Delta (an agricultural honorary society), The Ohio State University Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2004, and the North Central Regional winner of the Teaching Award from The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities in 2011. From 2005-2010, he served as Chair of the Executive Council for the OSU Academy of Teaching. The Academy itself is includes all winners of the university-wide OSU Alumni Association Award.
Dr. Donnermeyer continues to teach RS 1500 (Introduction to Rural Sociology), a GE course, and RS 5580 (Assessing the Human and Social Impacts of Change). Recently, he developed the e-version of RS 1500.
Although a criminologist for all of his academic career, he has a deep interest in the social, cultural and economic changes affecting the Amish. Specifically, his Amish research concerns examination of the demographic dimensions of the Amish, including population growth, settlement expansion and occupational change. Through much of his career, he annually taught a rural sociology course Amish Society at OSU. For the Religious Congregational and Membership Survey in 2012, Dr. Donnermeyer developed county-based estimates of the Amish population. He is the co-founder of The Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies and currently serves as the associate editor (OSU Libraries, Knowledge Bank). In March, 2016, Dr. Donnermeyer presented Understanding the Amish for the OSU TedX.