Joya Misra is a Distinguished Professor in both Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

She studies the intersectional inequalities impacting workers, and policies at both workplace and societal levels, that can mitigate these inequalities. She is an award-winning researcher, teacher, mentor, and public sociologist, who deeply appreciates working in a job that allows her to engage in such meaningful work.At UMass, she previously directed the Institute for Social Sc ience Research. In the discipline, she has served as Editor of Gender & Society (2011-2015), and Vice President (2019-2020) and President (2023-2024) of the American Sociological Association.

Misra’s work primarily falls into the subfields of race/gender/class, political sociology, work & labor, family, and welfare states. She is also a methodologist, who uses a wide variety of qualitative, quantitative, and comparative methods. She has published and edited a number of books, and her work has also appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Gender & Society, Social Forces, Social Problems, and numerous other professional journals. With her collaborators, her work has won more than six million dollars in grants and contracts, primarily from the National Science Foundation.