Robert Alun Jones

Personal History

Robert Alun Jones received his BA (1965) from the University of Redlands with a triple major in sociology, history, and literature, and his MA (1966) and PhD (1969) from the University of Pennsylvania in American Civilization (history, philosophy, and social theory). After a year in the sociology department at the University of Illinois, he taught Great Books in the humanities and social sciences department at Harvey Mudd College, Claremont. Since 1972, he has been at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently Professor of Religious Studies, History, and Sociology. He is a member of the Campus Honors Faculty, has a zero-time appointment in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and is also Senior Research Scientist for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Teaching

Professor Jones has won a number of awards for innovative teaching, including:

• four University of Illinois Undergraduate Instructional Awards (in 1973, 1982, 1986 and 1987)
• two AMOCO Foundation Awards for Undergraduate Instruction (in 1973 and 1987)
• the Prokasy Award for Distinguished Teaching (1985)
• the University’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1990)
• in 1990, he was also the University of Illinois nominee for the CASE “Professor of the Year” Award

He has developed and taught a variety of courses, including:

• Classical Social Theory
• Social Theories of Religion
• Sociology of Knowledge and Science
• European Intellectual History
• Religion, Science and Society

He has taught at all levels (freshmen and sophomores through advanced graduate students) in three different departments (Sociology, History, and Religious Studies). His most recent focus has been on two large, introductory courses for freshmen and sophomores, developed specifically for the University’s new general education requirements. The first -- The Sacred Mind -- focuses on the development of social and religious thought from the Homeric epics to the Enlightenment, and its sequel -- The Secular Mind -- deals with writers from the Enlightenment to the present. Professor Jones’s students are required to read primary sources (he “desktop publishes” his own collections of sources each semester), to write extensively and, increasingly, to use electronic texts and advanced information technologies.

Scholarship

Jones's research and writing has been in three related areas. The first is the life and works of the French philosopher and social theorist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), and particularly Durkheim's writings on religion and ethics. Jones is the author of Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works (1986), The Development of Durkheim's Social Realism (1999), and numerous essays and journal articles on Durkheim and his contemporaries, has been editor of both Études durkheimiennes and Knowledge and Society, and is currently responsible for the Durkheim site on the Internet. He is also writing a book on Durkheim’s sociology of religion.

A second, related interest is the methodology of the history of ideas. In particular, beginning with a series of articles in the early 1970's that applied the principles of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to the history of sociology, Jones has defended a more contextualist and historicist treatment of sociology's past. His essays "On Understanding a Sociological Classic" (1977) and "The New History of Sociology" (1983) introduced sociologists to the work of Quentin Skinner, the Cambridge historian of political theory, and provoked controversy over alternative treatments of the history of sociological theory. Most recently, in "The Other Durkheim" (1996), "Sociology and Irony" (1997), and "Sociologists and Metaphysicians" (1997), Jones has followed arguments advanced by Richard Rorty, extending his earlier historicism into a more general, neo-pragmatist account of the history of social and religious ideas generally.

Finally, Jones has written about the scholarly use of electronic documents and networked information systems, and particularly hypertext and hypermedia. In particular, together with his colleague, the cognitive psychologist Rand Spiro, he has argued that electronic, hypertext documents -- by placing texts within multiple contexts and breaking down the linear, hierarchical structure of their more traditional counterparts -- hold promise for the encouragement of "cognitive flexibility." These arguments have particularly been advanced in Jones and Spiro's "Imagined Conversations" (1992) and "Contextualization, Cognitive Flexibility, and Hypertext" (1995), and they provide the stimulus for many of Jones's activities in educational reform (see below).

Administration

Jones was among the authors of a 1988 report calling for new general education requirements at the University of Illinois, and served on the UIUC General Education Board responsible for their implementation. He was also responsible for the establishment of the Educational Technologies Board (a group of faculty and administrators providing support for technologically innovative instruction), and served as its first chairperson. He was a member of the Vice Chancellor’s Council on Undergraduate Education, the Campus Committee on Computing and Networking, and has served as a Mentor in both the Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellows and the Cohn Humanities Scholars Programs.

In 1987, Jones received campus funds to establish the Hypermedia Laboratory in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences -- one of the earliest and most advanced experiments using this technology. Under Jones's direction, the Hypermedia Lab opened in January, 1989 and, in addition to his own courses on social and religious thought, was used for course development and instruction in fields as diverse as agricultural economics, natural resource scarcity, collective behavior, urban and regional planning, French literature, biological modeling, and the sociology of cities and suburbs. More recently, working closely with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Program for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics, and the University Library, Jones's established the Advanced Information Technologies Laboratory. Again, with Jones as director, the AIT Lab supported more than twenty humanities and/or social science research and instructional development projects utilizing advanced information technologies, several of which have received major external funding and national and international recognition.

Additional Personal Information

Institutional Address	Program for the Study of Religion 3014 Foreign Language Building 707 South Matthews, MC-166 Urbana, Illinois 61801
Home Address	1203 South Race Street Urbana, Illinois 61801
Telephone/Fax	Office: (217) 333-0473 Home: (217) 367-3899 Fax: (217) 333-5225
Electronic mail	rajones@uiuc.edu