Sanyu A. Mojola

Sanyu A. Mojola is Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, and the Maurice P. During Professor of Demographic Studies at Princeton University.
She served as Director of Princeton’s Office of Population Research from 2020 to 2024. She has held sabbatical fellowships at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She will also be a visiting fellow at CRIS, Sciences Po.

Her mixed-methods research explores how societies produce health and illness, with a particular focus on the HIV/AIDS pandemic across contexts such as Kenya, South Africa, and the United States. She has examined how social dynamics within schools, communities, labour markets, cities, and ecosystems contribute to health inequalities. Her work pays particular attention to how the life course, gender, race/ethnicity, and socio-economic status shape health outcomes.

In addition to her award-winning book Love, Money and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS and her forthcoming book Death by Design: Producing Racial Health Inequality in the Shadow of the Capitol, her research has been published in journals including the American Journal of Sociology, Gender & Society, Demography, Social Science & Medicine, and the Journal of Marriage and Family.

The project

Title: Death by Design: Producing Racial Health Inequality in the Shadow of the Capitol

Washington, DC, the capital of the United States, has the nation’s largest racial life expectancy gap. It has also experienced some of the country’s most severe epidemics, including those of maternal and infant mortality, homicide, heroin overdose, and HIV/AIDS — all of which have disproportionately affected African Americans. Why and how does racial health inequality exist and endure?

Starting from the city’s founding in the late 1700s, and drawing on a wide range of sources — including archival materials, life history interviews, census data, vital statistics, and disease surveillance records — this book demonstrates how the physical, social, and policy design of the city has contributed to the production and reproduction of disproportionate Black death.

Hosting institution: Sciences Po

Selective Bibliography

• Love, Money and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS 
• Death by Design: Producing Racial Health Inequality in the Shadow of the Capitol
• Articles in the American Journal of Sociology, Gender and Society, Demography, Social Science and Medicine and Journal of Marriage and Family