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. Her early years were spent with her sister and a gaggle of girlfriends playing in the alleys and streets of their neighborhood. Stranger Danger. Kick the Can. Hopscotch. All those fun games kids played outdoors before the advent of the Internet.
At age 11, Monica moved with her family to a small town (population 1,200) 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. There, however, she remained somewhat in a state of culture shock—always the city girl in a puzzling world of farm animals and summer "lake people"—until returning to her hometown in 1984 to begin college at the University of Chicago.
She majored in sociology, convinced she would eventually attend law school and end up on the Supreme Court (as Chief Justice, of course). But surprisingly, Monica decided against law school in favor of academia. Turns out she liked engaging in critical social analysis. And she loved research from the beginning, from her first 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.
In 1990, Monica moved to San Francisco and began a lifelong love affair with California. Graduate school was a dream: enlightening, challenging, nurturing, and profoundly woman-centered. Some of Monica's best and most enduring relationships—with Adele Clarke, Virginia Olesen, and Lisa Jean Moore--were developed at UCSF. There, she learned not only how to be a passionate and conscientious sociologist of health and medicine, but also how (and why) to be a feminist mentor.
With PhD in hand, in 1995 she began a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical ethics at Stanford University, working with anthropologist Barbara Koenig and colleagues on an interdisciplinary project exploring genetic testing for breast cancer. And in 1996, she started her first tenure-track job in sociology, at one of the most beautiful campuses in the country, UC Santa Cruz. Monica published her first book, The Making of the Unborn Patient, in 1998 and was thrilled when it 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.
She relocated with her family to Nashville, Tennessee, where she served as director of Women’s and Gender Studies and a faculty member in sociology at Vanderbilt University. She spent four productive years in Nashville, building a program and raising her girls. But as a northern fish in southern waters, Monica never grew to fully appreciate the place, despite the gorgeous autumns. While she misses colleagues and friends (not to mention the delicious sweet tea at favorite haunts like Loveless Cafe), she was in high spirits the day she packed up Ginger (the minivan) and headed west.
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? She is nearing completion of Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z. This book, written for a popular audience, charts various dimensions of infant mortality through sixty entries ranging from "Absence" to "ZIP Code." Unlike noisy abortion politics, she describes infant mortality as “quiet politics” – the issue is deeply political, yet rarely discussed publicly.
Monica has also been researching elephant trauma, traumatic brain injury and domestic violence (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.
At age 11, Monica moved with her family to a small town (population 1,200) 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. There, however, she remained somewhat in a state of culture shock—always the city girl in a puzzling world of farm animals and summer "lake people"—until returning to her hometown in 1984 to begin college at the University of Chicago.
She majored in sociology, convinced she would eventually attend law school and end up on the Supreme Court (as Chief Justice, of course). But surprisingly, Monica decided against law school in favor of academia. Turns out she liked engaging in critical social analysis. And she loved research from the beginning, from her first 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.
In 1990, Monica moved to San Francisco and began a lifelong love affair with California. Graduate school was a dream: enlightening, challenging, nurturing, and profoundly woman-centered. Some of Monica's best and most enduring relationships—with Adele Clarke, Virginia Olesen, and Lisa Jean Moore--were developed at UCSF. There, she learned not only how to be a passionate and conscientious sociologist of health and medicine, but also how (and why) to be a feminist mentor.
With PhD in hand, in 1995 she began a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical ethics at Stanford University, working with anthropologist Barbara Koenig and colleagues on an interdisciplinary project exploring genetic testing for breast cancer. And in 1996, she started her first tenure-track job in sociology, at one of the most beautiful campuses in the country, UC Santa Cruz. Monica published her first book, The Making of the Unborn Patient, in 1998 and was thrilled when it 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.
She relocated with her family to Nashville, Tennessee, where she served as director of Women’s and Gender Studies and a faculty member in sociology at Vanderbilt University. She spent four productive years in Nashville, building a program and raising her girls. But as a northern fish in southern waters, Monica never grew to fully appreciate the place, despite the gorgeous autumns. While she misses colleagues and friends (not to mention the delicious sweet tea at favorite haunts like Loveless Cafe), she was in high spirits the day she packed up Ginger (the minivan) and headed west.
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? She is nearing completion of Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z. This book, written for a popular audience, charts various dimensions of infant mortality through sixty entries ranging from "Absence" to "ZIP Code." Unlike noisy abortion politics, she describes infant mortality as “quiet politics” – the issue is deeply political, yet rarely discussed publicly.
Monica has also been researching elephant trauma, traumatic brain injury and domestic violence (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.
In 2020, Monica left the beautiful Sonoran Desert for California, where she is Dean of the College of Arts and Letters and Professor of Sociology at San Diego State University. An Emerita Professor at University of Arizona, she continues her collaboration with the center she co-founded, the Consortium on Gender-Based Violence. With husband Bill, youngest daughter Laney, and Bao the Wonder Pup, Monica lives on half an acre in Mt. Helix, in a 1963 house with mid-century modern flare. She's planning an elaborate native species garden in her "spare" time and also keenly missing her oldest daughter, who is now at college.