Faculty Profiles
Dr. Michael Denton
assistant professor, Higher Education and Student Affairs
Email: denton2@usf.edu
Education: Ph.D., Miami University–Ohio
Dr. Denton is an assistant professor in the College of Education's Higher Education and Student Affairs programs. His research focuses on college student embodiment, which is how student bodies are regulated, policed, constrained, and constructed through cultural, societal, and institutional discourses, policies, and experiences. He specifically focuses on the impact of forces of able-bodiedness, illness/disease, HIV/AIDS, heteronormativity, and binary gender oppression in higher education. Dr. Denton's work uses critical and poststructural narrative and arts-based methods to examine common and distinct life experiences among HIV positive gay college men, trans collegians, and college students living with chronic illness.
He earned his BA in English and his MS in Counselor Education with an emphasis in Student Development at Mississippi State University. His PhD is in Higher Education and Student Affairs from Miami University, Ohio.
Dr. Denton has taught both graduate and undergraduate students since 2007. At USF, Dr. Denton has taught many of the CSA courses. He currently most frequently teaches Student Development Theory, Diversity in Higher Education, and Campus Environments. At the doctoral level he teaches Gender and Higher Education; Equity, Inclusion, & Social Justice in Higher Education; Queering Qualitative Research; and Race and Higher Education.
A Message from Dr. Denton:
"I hope my teaching and my research challenges conventional methods of understanding college students and pushes against heteronormative and ableist campus culture and research. Through my work, I seek to drive people to question the discourse of our institutions and to develop empathy for experiences unfamiliar to them. More eloquently, in the words of Audre Lorde, “For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding.”