David D. Franks, Professor Emeritus (Ph.D., Univ. of Minnesota, 1970)

Contact Information

Bird House, room 206
Tel.: (804) 828-6463
E-mail: dfranks@saturn.vcu.edu
Personal Web: http://saturn.vcu.edu/~dfranks

Specialty Areas: Social psychology, emotions, theory

Special Program: Project Tutor

Biographical Sketch

Professor David D. Franks was born in 1931 in Lexington Virginia. He and his wife have three children in their mid-thirties. Dr. Franks completed his undergraduate work at Milsaps College in Jackson Mississippi and did MS level work at Mississippi State and Tulane while teaching in Parochial Colleges in New Orleans. In 1961 he was a Street-Worker with delinquent gangs in Chicago and taught the next year at Mankato State college before entering the Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota. Here he focused on social organization and social psychology, especially symbolic interactionism. He was supported by an NIMH grant and taught Introductory and Social Psychology.

Professor Franks took a tenure track position at the University of Denver in 1969 teaching theory, methods and social psychology as well as Deviancy, Race Relations and Mental Disorder. In 1972 he received a large Grant from NIE to study the different effects of "open" and traditional Kansas City high schools on self-esteem and the development of personal autonomy. He was also granted tenure and promoted at that time. He served as chair of the faculty grievance committee and as president of the Faculty Senate.

In the summer of 1977 he accepted a position as chair of the department at VCU. In the early 80s, after writing on the usefulness of symbolic interaction in studying a social systems understanding of rape and partner abuse, he worked to develop a new sub-specialty in the Sociology of Emotions. This involved writing articles arguing for the social nature of something that had hithertofor been viewed as exclusively psychological. To this end he was also involved in editing guest issues of journals and an annual hard-back series, Social Perspectives on emotions, as well as several other volumes demonstrating the utility of the sub-field. He was also on numerous steering committees and chaired offices in the early days of the subsection. In the early 80s and early 90s he was vice president of the symbolic interaction national society. He has presented papers at national meetings with Dr. Lyng of this department on the importance of keeping a coherent idea of objectivity in our approaches to the social construction of reality and applying sociology to real world problems. Dr. Franks retired and was appointed Professor Emeritus in 2001.