Mil Duncan

Mil Duncan is founding director of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, which she oversaw from 2004 to 2011. Currently, Mil is a Carsey Senior Fellow and a consultant to AGree, an initiative bringing together diverse interests to transform food and agricultural policy in the United States, and she speaks frequently about rural poverty and change in America.

Widely recognized for her research on rural poverty and changing rural communities, Mil was a sociologist at UNH for eleven years before leaving to become director of the Ford Foundation’s Community and Resource Development Unit in 2000. At the Ford Foundation, she was responsible for a team of national and international leaders in the community development, youth, and environmental fields. Mil was the associate director of the Rural Economic Policy Program at the Aspen Institute prior to her former work at the university.

In 1999, Mil published Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America, which received the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best book in community and urban sociology. In 2015 a second edition, Worlds Apart: Poverty and Politics in Rural America was published with updates on each of the three communities. She is the author of numerous book chapters and refereed articles. She received a doctorate degree from the University of Kentucky in sociology and is a recipient of the University of Kentucky Department of Sociology Thomas R. Ford Distinguished Alumni Award. Mil has a bachelor's degree from Stanford University.