Michela Musto is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at Brown University, with expertise in the areas of gender & sexuality, race & ethnicity, education, children & families, and sport.
From K-12 schooling through professional sports, the notion of being “exceptional” permeates our daily lives. But who gets deemed exceptional, and how do these belief systems become gendered and racialized? Answering these questions forms the crux of Musto’s research agenda, which uses qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the social construction of exceptionalism in everyday life. An article in American Sociological Review identifies how school processes shape middle school students’ gendered and racialized assessments of their and other students’ intelligence. A book project on this same topic is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.
Musto’s other work on the social construction of exceptionalism has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Social Forces, Gender & Society, The Sociology of Sport Journal, Communication & Sport, and Education Policy Analysis Archives. Additionally, Musto is the co-author of Child’s Play, an edited volume published with Rutgers University Press that takes social inequality in youth sport as its subject of inquiry.
Prior to Brown, Musto was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research (2018 - 2020) and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia (2020 - 2023). While at UBC, Musto was also the recipient of a 2021 NAEd/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Musto received a BS in sociology and statistics from the University of Michigan, and an MA and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Southern California.
