Career
She was president of the American Anthropological Association from 2011–2013, and is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New New York Under her leadership, the American Anthropological Association took up the issue of academic labor rights. Her research and writing have focused on structures of inequality and resistance to them.
Her research began in Africa and she has written about traditional medicine and religion in postcolonial Ghana, as well as about women's roles in Africa.
In the United States. her work has centered on urban communities. Mullings is currently working on an ethnohistory of the African Burial Ground in New York City.