John D. Abell, Professor of Economics, holds the Carl Stern Chair of Economics at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. He received his Masters and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Kentucky (1983,1985).

His formal training was in the areas of macroeconomics, monetary economics, and finance. His early research employed traditional macroeconometric time series techniques to analyze the employment impacts of monetary and fiscal policies as they were distributed along racial and gender lines. His teaching and research have evolved over the years in the direction of food, sustainability, and local economics. This work has taken him from the central highlands of Guatemala to the streets of Lynchburg, Virginia.

In 2011, he offered a course on the “Economics of Food and Sustainability”. He and his students conducted research to determine the extent to which Lynchburg’s urban core constituted a food desert. They investigated convenience stores and nearby grocery stores to compare prices and food availability. They found prices averaging 90 percent more in the convenience stores and virtually no fresh food. Their findings were published in the Virginia Economic Journal in 2011.

Sabbatical research in spring semester 2014 on the topic of hunger and poverty in Lynchburg was documented in a video blog titled: “The hunger-poverty nexus. Food? What is its proper role? Case study of Lynchburg, Virginia.” The findings were also published in the Virginia Social Science Journal in 2015.

His current research connects the poverty in Lynchburg of the present, especially for blacks, with the racism of the past, in particular, the real estate redlining practices of the 1930s. Preliminary findings were published as an opinion piece in the News and Advance in April 2018.

Professor Abell has won the Gillie A. Larew Award (2005-06) given for outstanding teaching, and the Katherine Graves Davidson Award (2012-13) given to faculty who have brought distinction to the college.

Beyond Randolph’s “red brick walls,” Professor Abell has served on the board of directors of the Lynchburg Area Food Council (2012-14), serving one year as president and also serving on the board of Lynchburg Daily Bread (2016-19). He has assisted in the planning and construction of three community gardens: Randolph College’s own organic garden 2010), one in the Daniel’s Hill neighborhood (2013), and more recently at New Vistas School (2014).