Mignon R. Moore

Mignon R. Moore is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Sociology at Barnard College. Her areas of expertise include LGBTQ populations, qualitative research methods, intersections of race and gender, family, and aging. She has received grants to support her work from the National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and was a 2022-23 Visiting Researcher in Residence at the Russell Sage Foundation for Social Science Research. 

Moore is a past deputy editor of Gender & Society and the American Sociological Review. Her funded research has been published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Gender & Society, and The DuBois Review, among other scholarly outlets. 

Her first book, "Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood among Black Women," won the 2012 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association and was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her current work examines health and social support for sexual minority seniors to determine the ways community institutions can better serve them. She is finishing a new book titled "In the Shadow of Sexuality: Social Histories and the Development of Community among Black Sexual Minority Women, 1950-1979," which the University of California Press will publish. 

Over the past 25 years, Moore has had a research career accompanied by steady activity of mentoring and support and has received recognition for this work from the City of Los Angeles and the Human Rights Campaign, among other organizations. From 2012 to 2015, she was co-director of the NIH Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, where she trained new PhD and MD scientists in study design and journal writing for qualitative research studies.

Currently, she co-directs the Russell Sage Foundation and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Proposal Development Summer Institute, which offers mentoring and professional development to tenure-track social scientists from historically underrepresented groups and under-resourced institutions. Mignon Moore was the 2021 President of Sociologists for Women in Society and the 2023 Vice President of the American Sociological Association. 

Education

PhD 1998 University of Chicago
BA 1992 Columbia College

Books

"Invisible Families:  Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood Among Black Women," University of California Press.  

"Marriage Equality and the African American Case: Intersections of Race and LGBT Sexuality," in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 29, 2: 196-203.