ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ

Monica J. Casper, PhD, is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ.  

Born and raised in Chicago and rural Wisconsin, Casper is a proud First Gen graduate of the University of Chicago, where she studied sociology. After college, she worked in fundraising, first for the University of Chicago Library and then for a domestic violence shelter in the city. Deeply committed to advancing women’s health research and advocacy, she earned her PhD in sociology at , renowned for medical sociology, women's health, qualitative methodologies, and health policy.

Following graduate school, she completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in at Stanford University, working on a project focused on . As an assistant professor of sociology at UC Santa Cruz, she published her first book, The , in 1998, which won the  . She was tenured at UCSC and then took a hiatus from academia to pursue another important vocation—mothering. 

From 2004 to 2008, she directed Women’s and Gender Studies (now Gender and Sexuality Studies) at Vanderbilt University, before joining Arizona State University as Director of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies. She was then recruited to serve as Head of Gender and Women's Studies in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona, where she subsequently became Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs and Inclusion. Before arriving at ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ in 2024, Casper was Dean of the College of Arts and Letters and .  

Deeply curious about the world and its human and nonhuman inhabitants, Casper’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 prematurely? Whose bodies suffer, and whose thrive? For several years, Casper has been researching (·É¾±³Ù³ó ), various aspects of , and . 

Her most recent monograph,, was published in 2022. The book charts various dimensions of infant mortality through sixty entries ranging from "Absence" to "ZIP Code." She describes infant mortality in terms of “quiet politics” – an issue that is deeply political, yet rarely discussed publicly. 

, co-authored with Rebecca G. Martínez, was published in 2025. The edited collection showcases the ways universities can be inequitable and damaging, especially for marginalized people. Contributors share their lived experiences of academic life from diverse vantage points, shining a spotlight on higher education today, including the promise of inclusion and the harms of exclusion. 

Casper is an inclusive, collaborative leader. Her commitment to fostering an inclusive workplace has been recognized with a Changemaker Award from the . She is deeply committed to student success and supporting faculty and staff at ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ's College of Arts and Sciences. In addition to shepherding the college through merges and reorganizations, she is engaged in a project of reimagining the college’s identity.  

She is a creative writer, as well, having been published in various literary journals and nominated for prizes, including the Pushcart. She prefers hybrid writing and is dreaming into being a speculative fiction story about a woman who transforms into a superhero after treatment for breast cancer.