Faculty Profile: Jessica Hoffman, PhD
When Jessica Hoffman travels overseas, her favorite activity isn’t to visit castles or museums—it’s to sit quietly and observe locals going about their daily lives.
“I like going to foreign countries just to watch people,” she says. “I’m a people watcher.”
Her travel passion fits in with her academic passion: sociology. As an assistant professor of sociology in the Bachelor of Science (BS) in Liberal Studies program at Hilbert College, Hoffman is fascinated by cultural diversity and the ways in which social systems affect individuals.
She also enjoys watching her students when they have aha moments about sociology. “They don’t always see the value of social science,” she says. “But once we get into the content, they start to see how applicable it is to their everyday lives. I really like seeing that happen in the classroom.”
Discovering Sociology in Hawaii
Hoffman didn’t grow up in a diverse culture. Her home was in a rural, white, working-class county outside Ithaca, New York, where she was the first in her family to get a bachelor’s degree.
College led to a radical change in her worldview. She married a military spouse (later divorced) who moved them to Hawaii. She found herself in the midst of a multicultural stew that mixed Indigenous, Polynesian and Asian influences.
“I felt like I was in a whole different world,” Hoffman recalls. “That was where my interest in sociology was piqued. It made me start to ask a lot more questions about how the world works.”
One course that especially challenged her was about the sociology of drugs. A professor asked her to consider how society would be different if coffee were made illegal.
“To demonstrate social constructionism was really interesting to me as a 20-year-old,” she says. “I first started thinking about bigger picture items like social structure and governance and where I fit in.”
Social Impacts of Gender
After earning a bachelor’s in sociology and psychology, Hoffman decided to pursue sociology in graduate school. She came back to upstate New York, getting her master’s and doctorate degrees at the University at Buffalo.
Her graduate studies included various research projects. Many of them examined how gender attitudes affect individuals’ values and behaviors.
In one project, she interviewed students from middle school through college about what they considered best and worst about being a boy or a girl. She found that both genders focused on biology and appearance over other aspects of their lives.
For her dissertation, she talked to first-time mothers about how they made medical decisions. The strongest influence, she found, was their perception of birth as a risky procedure. They chose to give birth in medical facilities as a way to reduce risk.
Another discovery was the weight they placed on other people’s opinions. “One woman was told she shouldn’t drink coffee by a barista,” Hoffman says. “I thought that was really interesting, the way in which both strangers and people in their social network tried to police their behavior.”
Sociology and Liberal Studies
Hoffman’s career took another turn after getting her doctorate in 2017, when she was offered a teaching position at Hilbert.
Her central role there is in its Liberal Studies department. She works with three other professors, of religious studies, philosophy and political science.
While the department is small, its subject matter is expansive. The degree program encourages students to design their own curriculum, choosing 70% of their classes from electives in social sciences, humanities and natural sciences, and math.
“The beauty of sociology and liberal studies more generally is that you can be pretty flexible,” Hoffman says. “It’s multidisciplinary. You can choose what you want to study.”
Liberal studies skills can be an asset for any occupation, Hoffman adds. She points to criminal justice as an example.
“Many criminal justice students have a background in social sciences or liberal arts,” she says. “If you want to enforce the law, it’s useful to think about how the law is made. You have to understand social justice in order to understand criminal justice.”
Critical Thinking Is Skillful Thinking
Another valuable liberal studies skill, Hoffman says, is critical thinking: analyzing a situation through multiple lenses, not just the first one that presents itself.
“The ability to deal with different topics from different perspectives is really going to set students ahead,” she says. “We’re trying to teach them how to deal with evidence and make sense of things that aren’t black and white. That’s critical thinking.”
Sociological perspectives, she says, can help students better understand events that happen around them. She points to the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, in which a white supremacist gunman killed 10 shoppers in a local supermarket.
“I teach a culture class that focuses on race and ethnicity,” she says. “It’s a service to talk to students about race and ethnicity and the importance it plays in society. When we have people getting massacred at the grocery store, we have to talk about it.”
Outside of her job, Hoffman also shows a keen interest in other cultures. Her favorite travel destinations are as diverse as Thailand, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Another is Nevis, an island in the British West Indies. It’s the birthplace of her current partner and, she also notes, of Alexander Hamilton. When she’s there, she enjoys immersing herself in a very different way of life.
Learn More About the Value of Liberal Studies
In an increasingly complex and multicultural society, liberal studies can prepare students for a wide array of occupations. A degree program like the BS in Liberal Studies program at Hilbert can give a student a broad background in the humanities and social and natural sciences as well as the ability to think critically from a diverse set of perspectives. Discover more about how Hilbert can help lay a foundation for a rewarding career.
Recommended Readings
Unlocking the Value of a Liberal Arts Education
What Is Liberal Studies?
Why Are the Humanities Important?