Mark Jeffreys

As an English professor at the University of Alabama, Mark Jeffreys published a number of essays and two books on poetry and poetics. Having switched to a career in anthropology, he completed a second doctorate in Human Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Utah. His dissertation uses behavioral game theory, evolutionary psychology, and experimental economics to test competing hypotheses about the evolution of human social emotions. Since joining the UVU faculty, he has lectured on the topic of human social emotions at two national conferences, UVU’s Integrated Studies Forum, the international Global Gaming convention in Las Vegas, and at conferences in South Africa, Italy, and Scotland. A member of the editorial board of the Journal of Medical Humanities, he also teaches and publishes in the field of disability studies. He has taught classes on cultural anthropology, evolutionary ecology, the evolution of sex, and the anthropology of disability, while also advising approximately 100 capstone projects. He served as faculty advisor for the program’s student-edited journal. His primary goal as a mentor of undergraduates is to get students more involved in original research, regardless of their academic areas of emphasis.  Professor Jeffreys was one of the invited scholars presenting at the Genetics, Literature, Film, & Popular Culture conference at Vanderbilt’s Center for Genetics & Health Policy in November of 2003. A festschrift volume from the conference will be published in 2004. The paper (for the conference & the published volume) is on popular film representations of genetic mutants as monsters & superheroes, tying them in to enduring popular myths about “saltational” jumps in evolution & the controversies surrounding bioethics of genetic engineering & the old eugenics.