Lisa Jean Moore
Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies
Lisa Jean Moore is a medical sociologist and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. Her scholarship is located at the intersections of sociology of health and medicine, science and technology studies, feminist studies, animal studies, and body studies.
More About Me
Trained in feminist qualitative research methods, I use sociological tools to investigate cultural meanings about human bodies and emergent human and non-human animal relationships. My teaching style is highly interactive and discussion-based. We read theory and ethnographies, dissect novels and memoirs, view films and videos, and share our own writing in small groups.
In addition to teaching at Purchase College during the school year, I teach in the travel abroad programs to India, Norway, Benin, and Italy in the months of June, July and August.
When I am very lucky, I have the opportunity to teach at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in their college program.
Research Interests
- Science and Technology Studies
- Feminism and Gender Studies
- Public Health
- Critical Body Studies
- Urban Animals
- Horseshoe Crabs
- Honeybees
- Spider Goats
Representative Courses
- Contemporary Social Theory
- Feminist Theory
- Urban Ecology and Animal Studies
- Public Health: Outbreak Investigations
- Social and Cultural Studies of Food
- Science, Medicine, and Culture
- Masculinities: Feminist Perspectives
- Birth and Death
- Science Technology and Queer Theory
- Bioethics
- Human Sexuality
- Critical Animal Studies
- The Buzz about Bees
- Artificial Intelligence
- Play, Leisure and Imagination
- Cross Cultural Solutions to Climate Change
Publications
A distinguished scholar at the intersection of feminist theory, sociology of the body, and biopolitics, her groundbreaking research examines how bodies become sites of cultural, scientific, and political negotiation.
She is the author of several influential books, including:
- Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid (2007)
- Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility (co-authored, 2009)
- Gendered Bodies: Feminist Perspectives (co-authored, 2010)
- Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee (co-authored with Mary Kosut, 2013) - Winner of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Scholarship Book Award from the Animals and Society section
- The Body: Social and Cultural Dissections (co-authored with Monica J. Casper, 2014)
- Catch and Release: The Enduring yet Vulnerable Horseshoe Crab (2018)
- Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification and the Will to Change Nature (2022)
Her scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals including Ethnography, Social Text, and Body and Society.
Forthcoming Works
Two major works are forthcoming in 2026 and 2027:
The Unknowable Body (Polity Press, 2026)
This deeply personal and theoretical exploration examines how bodies exceed our attempts to fully know them across four dimensions: medical/diagnostic unknowability, emotional unknowability, temporal unknowability, and gender/identity unknowability. Drawing on her experiences with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) alongside her ex-partner’s brain tumor diagnosis, she weaves together medical sociology, feminist theory, and personal narrative to examine how illness transforms not just individual bodies but entire family systems and conceptual frameworks.
The Right to Know: The Past, Present, and Future of Higher Education in New York Prisons (NYU Press, 2027)
This edited volume explores the complex landscape of higher education in New York’s prison system following the restoration of Pell funding. Bringing together diverse perspectives from formerly incarcerated students, faculty, corrections leaders, and policymakers, the collection examines the historic role of public universities in prison education while advocating for education as a fundamental human right for incarcerated individuals. Book edited with Purchase College colleague Ragnhild Utheim.