Monica J. Casper, PhD

Monica was born in Chicago the same year the National Organization for Women was founded and exactly one week before the debut of the television series Star Trek. She grew up in the city and in rural southeastern Wisconsin, where she learned how to ride (and occasionally crash) dirt bikes and snowmobiles, worked as a newspaper delivery girl and a carhop, and made lasting friends. She returned to Chicago to study sociology at the University of Chicago and fell in love with the discipline after conducting an ethnographic study of a Hyde Park street.

After college, she worked for two years in fundraising/development, first for the University of Chicago Library and then for a domestic violence shelter in the city—the only Chicago shelter at that time to welcome women and their children. Deeply committed to advancing women’s health and reproductive justice, she decided to attend graduate school in sociology at UC San Francisco, renowned for medical sociology, women's health, qualitative methodologies, and health policy.

After earning her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, San Francisco in 1995, she began a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical ethics at Stanford University. As an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz, she published her first book, The Making of the Unborn Patient, in 1998, which won the C. Wright Mills Award. She was tenured at UCSC and then, unconventionally, took a hiatus from academia to pursue another important mission—mothering.

In 2000, on an extended leave of absence from UCSC, she moved to a little yellow bungalow on Whidbey Island in Washington State. Monica gave birth to her first daughter in 2001. Wanting to engage more actively in community-based work, she accepted a job as Executive Director of the Intersex Society of North America. She also published an edited volume, Synthetic Planet, about environmental politics. Monica's work for ISNA was cut short by the arrival of her second daughter in 2004.

From 2004 to 2008, she served as director of Women’s and Gender Studies and a faculty member in sociology at Vanderbilt University before moving back West and joining Arizona State University, serving as Director of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies. She was then recruited to serve as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Inclusion and Professor of Gender and Women's Studies in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona. Before arriving at Seattle University, Monica was Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at San Diego State University.

Deeply curious about the world, Monica's research and writing interests are varied. At the heart of her work is a set of fundamental questions: Who gets to live? Who is made to die? Whose bodies suffer, and whose thrive? Her most recent book, Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z, was published in 2022. Written for a popular audience, the book charts various dimensions of infant mortality through sixty entries ranging from "Absence" to "ZIP Code." Unlike noisy abortion politics, she describes infant mortality in terms of “quiet politics” – the issue is deeply political, yet rarely discussed publicly.

Monica has also been researching elephant trauma, traumatic brain injury (with Dan Morrison), and the vital but understudied role of the placenta in reproductive health. She is a creative writer, too; her work has been published in various literary journals and nominated for prizes, including the Pushcart. She prefers hybrid writing, is a terrible poet, and is dreaming into being a science fiction novel about climate change, fetal rights, and badass women warriors in the post-Apocalyptic West.