Professor Emerita · Justice Studies and Social Inquiry · Arizona State University

Mary Romero holds a professorship at Arizona State University with affiliate status in Women and Gender Studies, Asian Pacific American Studies, and African and African American Studies.

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Awards & Recognition

In 2022, Romero received the American Sociological Association’s W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award. In 2017, she received the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award recognizing a lifetime of contributions to research, teaching, and service. She previously won the ASA Section on Race and Ethnicity Minorities 2009 Founder’s Award and the 2004 Lee Founders Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems — that organization’s highest honor for activist scholarship. She was a Carnegie Scholar and Pew National Fellow through the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

At the Desert Botanical Garden

Award ceremony

Published Works

• Research Handbook on Intersectionality (Editor), Edward Elgar Publishing (2023)
• Introducing Intersectionality, Cambridge: Polity Press (2018)
• The Maid’s Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the American Dream, NYU Press (2011)
• Maid in the U.S.A., Routledge (1992; Tenth Anniversary Edition 2002)
• Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities (with Eric Margolis, 2005)
• Latino/a Popular Culture, NYU Press (2002)
• Women’s Untold Stories, Routledge (1999)
• Challenging Fronteras, Routledge (1997)
• Women and Work: Exploring Race, Ethnicity and Class, Sage (1997)

Research Focus

Her scholarship examines the unequal distribution of reproductive labor as a paid commodity and its role in reproducing inequality. Her research integrates feminist legal perspectives on caregiving with questions about whether domestic work should fall under family or employment law. Additionally, her work addresses social inequalities through intersectional analysis of race, class, gender, and citizenship, connecting domestic gendered relations to immigration and discrimination patterns.