Michael H. Esposito

Biography

I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, where I am affiliated with the Minnesota Population Center and the Life Course Center. My research has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, PNAS, Social Forces, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Health Affairs, and the American Journal of Public Health. It is currently supported by an R01 from the National Institute on Aging, with Jessica Finlay, examining how neighborhoods shape cognitive health across the life course. I serve as a Deputy Editor of Demography and as a Consulting Editor for the American Journal of Sociology, and in 2025 I was named a Scholar of the College by UMN’s College of Liberal Arts.

Prior to joining the University of Minnesota in 2023, I served as an Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis (2021–2023) and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan (2018–2021). I completed my PhD in Sociology at the University of Washington (2018), with a Concentration in Social Statistics from the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences and a Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods from the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.

Research Focus

In my research, I focus on conceptualizing and empirically demonstrating how power imbalance between social groups is a reservoir that produces and refortifies health inequalities over time. Indeed, I theorize health inequality as a specific manifestation of a more general social process -- i.e., how unbalanced social power enables some groups to monopolize health-relevant resources while also redirecting hazards onto others -- and produce quantitative evidence of this dynamic using the persistent racial and class-based health inequalities observed in the U.S. as cases in point. More directly, my work centers on a stylized question: How is it that Black and working-class Americans have, at almost any moment in the century or so we've monitored population health, borne a disproportionate share of illness and premature death relative to their White, professional-class peers? More often than not, the answer traces back to some practice, policy, or institution in a contemporaneous or preceding period made possible by a distribution of power tilted along the lines of race and class.

I generally contribute to this area in three ways:

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  (first,) by documenting the concrete and variable harms that specific institutions at specific moments of time have played in creating health vulnerabilities. (E.g., how residential segregation currently generates massive inequalities in ADRD risks; how discriminatory laws from decades ago overlap with unequal mortality vulnerabilities today.)
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  (second,) by conceptualizing how these discriminatory logics not only segment access to resources and exposure to hazards, but also distort social processes that are (made) fundamental for wellbeing in the US. (E.g., how social mobility yields unequal health returns across racial groups.)
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  & (third,) by ruminating on -- and sometimes attempting to address -- the challenges of using quantitative data to accurately capture and analyze the complicated, often multilevel causal processes that produce health inequality.