Misra is engaged in research projects with a number of collaborators, including: 

Misra has been exploring pathways to leadership among higher education administrators. Her project  funded by the ARC Network as part of the Virtual Visiting Scholars program focuses on how leadership is related to service work imbalances. With Jessica Pearlman, she recently received a large grant from the National Science Foundation, to collect data about leadership experiences across a nationally-representative sample of public universities, as well as follow-up interviews with a group of leaders. 

With Chen-Shuo Hong, Misra analyzes how culture and policies intersect to shape gender inequalities across a range of countries, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study data, European and World Values Study, and OECD Gender Data Portal. Hong and Misra explore how cultural attitudes and the gender division of labor reflect and mediate the effect of work-family policies on factors such as women’s employment, wages, and risk of poverty in a book manuscript as well as in shorter works.  

Funded by a $3 million dollar National Science Foundation ADVANCE-IT grant, Misra collaborates with Ethel Mickey, Ember Skye Kanelee, and Laurel Smith-Doerr on how race, gender, and nationality impact faculty experiences such as collaboration and inclusion in departments. Another collaboration with Ethel Mickey and Dessie Clark explores how the pandemic has exacerbated racial and gender inequalities among faculty, and how to best ameliorate those effects.

Misra has published a number of articles with Kyla Walters, as well as their University of California (2022) book, Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work. In the book, Misra and Walters analyze the experiences of young retail clothing workers, and what their experiences tell us about race, gender, and service work in the 21st century. The book considers how workers engage with managers, co-workers, and customers, pointing out how surveillance technologies and big data in 21st century workplaces are reworking the nature of work. In addition, the book analyzes how aesthetic labor is regulated. Throughout the book, the authors identify race and gender as central to workers’ experiences.