MONICA CASPER
Ph.D. University of California, San Francisco, 1995
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Stanford University, 1996
TITLE:   Director, Women's and Gender Studies
     Program
Associate Professor of Sociology
Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies
OFFICE:   220 Garland Hall, Station B #350086
EMAIL:   monica.casper@vanderbilt.edu

PHONE:   615-343-7808

HONORS, AWARDS, GRANTS RECEIVED

Distinguished Book Award, Sex and Gender Section, ASA, 1999

C. Wright Mills Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems, 1998

NSF New Investigator Research Award, 1998-99

Roberta G. Simmons Outstanding Dissertation Award, Medical Sociology Section, ASA, 1996

COURSES TAUGHT

  Body and Society
  Sex, Power, and Politics
  Cultural Politics of Reproduction
  Feminist Science and Technology Studies
  Gender, Race, Justice, and the Environment
  Research Methods in Women's and Gender Studies
  Gender and Pedagogy
  Gender and Sexuality: Feminist Approaches
  Field Methods
  Disabilitiy and Society
  Biopolitics and Biopower


RESEARCH INTERESTS

Women's health
Feminist studies of science, technology, and medicine
Gender, bodies, and sexuality
Environmental health and justice
Public health aspects of security and war
Reproductive technologies
Bioethics
Disability studies
Children's health
Qualitative Methodologies

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

Phantom Babies: The Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality
      An ethnographic study of infant death, particularly its
      relationship to social movements and its presence
      in U.S. public life
Globalizing Contraception: Mapping the Brave New World of
      Female Sterilization, With Shubhra Sharma (Vanderbilt       University) A historical, comparative study of non-surgical
      female sterilization, focused specifically on Quinacrine
      and Essure
Sex Drugs, and Inflammation: Cervical Cancer, the HPV Vaccine,
      and American "Promiscuity," with Laura Carpenter

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Missing Bodies: Revealing Invisibility in Biopolitical Worlds, with Lisa Jean Moor. New York University Press, forthcoming.

"Feminist Disability Studies," with Heather Laine Talley. The Encyclopedia of Sociology, Blackwell, 2006.

Editor, "Ethnography and Disability Studies," Special Issue of Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 34(2), April 2005.

Editor. Synthetic Planet: Chemical Politics and the Hazards of Modern Life. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003).

"Chemical Weapons 'Dispersal'?: The Mundane Politics of Air Monitoring," in Monica J. Casper, ed., Synthetic Planet: Chemical Politics and the Hazards of Modern Life (New York: Routledge, 2003).

"Knockout Women: A Review of Karyn Kusama's Girlfight," Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 25(1):104-110, 2001.

"The Case of the Disappearing Moms: Fetal Surgery and Women's Health," in Kathryn Strother Ratcliff, ed., Women and Health: Power, Technology, Inequality, and Conflict in a Gendered World (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001).

The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998). [Winner of the C. Wright Mills Award, SSSP, 1998].

"Negotiations, Work Objects, and the Unborn Patient: The Interactional Scaffolding of Fetal Surgery," Symbolic Interaction, 21(4), 1998, 379-399.

"Feminist Politics and Fetal Surgery: Adventures of a Research Cowgirl on the Reproductive Frontier." Feminist Studies 23:2, 1997, 233-262.