Dr. Ara Francis

Dr. Ara Francis is an Associate Professor of Sociology at College of the Holy Cross where she teaches courses on death, dying, and bereavement, deviance and difference, and selfhood. She is interested, broadly, in social disruption, suffering, and loss. Her recent scholarship explores the professionalization of end-of-life doulas and death midwives, focusing specifically on how gender complicates the construction of their occupational identities. She is also the author of Family Trouble: Middle-Class Parents, Children’s Problems, and the Disruption of Everyday Life (2015, Rutgers University Press). Dr. Francis’s current writing aims to bring the work of African American scholars into dialogue with longstanding assumptions in death studies regarding modernity and people’s awareness of mortality.