Monica Grant

Monica Grant serves as a Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with additional affiliations in the African Studies program and the Center for Demography and Ecology. Her research centers on gender inequalities during early life course transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, examining how educational attainment and the HIV/AIDS epidemic shape adult life domains including fertility, marriage, and economic well-being.

Her core research areas include Gender, Family, Demography and Ecology, Education, Economic Change and Development, Aging and the Life Course, and Methods and Statistics. She investigates how social structures influence life trajectories, with specific focus on educational inequality, HIV/AIDS impacts, divorce experiences, and child fostering dynamics among adolescents and young adults in Malawi. Her methodological expertise spans demographic analysis and longitudinal survey research.

Analysis of her publication record reveals consistent thematic focus on Malawi and Sub-Saharan Africa, with dominant threads including educational inequality in secondary schooling transitions, fertility patterns linked to female education, family dissolution impacts on child welfare, and gendered health outcomes. Her work demonstrates sophisticated integration of demographic methods with life course theory, consistently highlighting how structural inequalities manifest in individual life trajectories across developing contexts.