Joya Misra

Joya Misra is a distinguished professor at the School of Public Policy and in the Department of Sociology. 

Her research focuses on both labor and social policies. She studies how policies are adopted, how they are implemented, and their effects, and takes an intersectional lens to consider how gender, race, nationality, citizenship status, parenthood, and other factors matter to the policy process. Her research on work-family policies uses a comparative approach that includes North America, Europe, and Asia, with a focus on ways that social policies can both entrench and mediate existing inequalities. Her research on migration policies considers political and economic transnational contexts shaping migration around the world. 

Misra was the 2023-2024 President of the American Sociological Association. She recently co-authored Walking Mannequins: How Racial And Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work (University of California Press, 2022). She is co-editor of The New Handbook of Political Sociology(Cambridge University Press, 2020), Gendered Lives, Sexual Beings(Sage, 2017), and Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the 21st Century (University of California Press, 2007). 

Misra's research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation; she has also served as the Roy J. Zuckerberg Endowed Leadership Chair, 2022-2024. She has won a number of teaching and mentoring awards, and the Eastern Sociological Society Public Sociology Award, and the World Bank/Luxembourg Income Study Gender Research Award. Her work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Gender and Society, Social Forces, Social Problems, and numerous other publications. She is the former editor of Gender and Society, the premier social science journal in gender.

She received her PhD from Emory University.