Monica J. Casper, Ph.D.

Professor Emerita

Monica J. Casper, Ph.D., is a sociologist whose scholarly and teaching interests include gender, bodies, health, sexuality, disability, and trauma, with particular expertise in reproductive health and politics. Her work is deeply interdisciplinary and includes such approaches as environmental justice, medical humanities, critical trauma studies, and health disparities. She is currently Dean of Arts and Letters, San Diego State University.

She has published several books including the award-winning The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery; is co-editor of TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism; and is a managing editor of The Feminist Wire. She is founding co-editor, with Lisa Jean Moore, of the Biopolitics series at NYU Press. Dr. Casper is currently involved in several research projects: 1) the biopolitics of maternal/child health and infant mortality in the United States; 2) social and biomedical consequences of traumatic brain injury, with Dan Morrison; and 3) a study of social aspects of parental child abduction. She also writes fiction and creative nonfiction, and has been published in a number of literary journals. 

Dr. Casper received her B.A. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1988 and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, San Francisco in 1995. In 1996 she was a Fellow in Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University and then joined the sociology faculty at UC Santa Cruz, where she taught for several years. In 2003, she served as Executive Director of the Intersex Society of North America and from 2004-2008 directed the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Vanderbilt University. Prior to joining the University of Arizona faculty, she taught at Arizona State University where, from 2008-2011, she directed Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies.

 

Degree(s)

  • Ph.D., 1995, Sociology, University of California, San Francisco
  • B.A., 1988, Sociology, University of Chicago

Research Interests

  • Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality
  • Cultural Politics of Reproduction
  • Feminist Theories/Epistemologies
  • Biopolitics and Bioethics
  • Gender, Race, and Health
  • Gender-Based Violence / Violence Against Women and Girls
  • Feminist Technoscience Studies
  • Disability Studies
  • Critical Trauma Studies
  • Medical Humanities
  • Environmental Health and Justice
  • Militarization, War, and Weapons
  • Qualitative Methods
website