Margarita Mooney
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Faculty Fellow of the Carolina
Populations Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
B.A. Yale University
M.A. Princeton University
Ph.D. Princeton
University
Margarita Mooney joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007 as an Assistant Professor of Sociology and as a Faculty Fellow of the Carolina Population Center. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Yale University (1995) and her M.A. (2000) and Ph.D. (2005) in Sociology from Princeton University. Her previous work has focused on immigrant acculturation, religion, and education. She is currently beginning a new mixed-methods research project on how religion influences the wellbeing of older international migrants to the United States as well as the elder family members of migrants who remain in their countries of origin. This new project builds both methodologically and substantively on her prior work. Her book, Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora, which will be published in 2009 with the University of California Press, demonstrates that although Haitian immigrants’religious faith appears very similar across three different cities of the diaspora, the way in which their religious institutions mediate for them and therefore support their adaptation depends greatly on different histories of church-state relations.
She is also a co-author on a forthcoming book with Princeton University Press entitled Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities. This book, along with several articles she has co-authored, examines the social and academic trajectories of minority students at elite institutions of higher education. A summary of her findings about how Latino students’ perceptions of their minority status influence their college achievement and social engagement appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on March 28, 2008.
