Joseph Donnermeyer

Joseph F. Donnermeyer (born 5 December 1949) is an American academic. He is a Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University , School of Environment and Natural Resources. His main subject is rural criminology, with a focus on Amish studies, especially on change in Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities.

Career Donnermeyer completed his B.A. in 1971 from Thomas More College, Kentucky, and both his M.A. (1974) and Ph.D. (1977) from the University of Kentucky. In 1999 he became assistant professor in the Department of Human and Community Resource Development at the same university, where the rural sociology program was moved. In 2010, Rural Sociology was moved again to the School of Environment and Natural Resources. The first issue of IJRC was published in 2011, but it was only published sporadically until it became co-sponsored by the three professional groups.

Donnermeyer also founded another journal for the publication of scholarship about the Amish and related Anabaptist groups. The first journal was published through the OSU Knowledge Bank, with the inaugural issue published in 2013. This was eventually replaced by the Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities (JPAC) in May 2019, and upgraded to the digital journal collection of OSU libraries. JPAC is now co-sponsored by the OSU libraries, the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, the Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center in Berlin, Ohio, and "Amish America", a blog produced by Erik Wesner.