Areas of study:

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2008-2009 Classes:

Winter 2009:
60: Women of Color: Race, Class, and Ethnicity
183A: Advanced Research Seminar

Spring 2009:
182: Feminist Research and Practice
TBA  

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Education:

PhD. New York University (American History and History of the African Dispora
M.A. New York University (American History and History of the African Dispora)
B.A. Emory University (History)

Dissertation: "A Taste for Brown Sugar: The History of Black Women in American Pornography."  

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Biography:

Mireille Miller-Young, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies and Affiliate Assistant Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research explores race, gender and Black sexuality in sexual media and sex economies in the U.S. Employing archival, textual and discourse analysis, and feminist ethnographic research about Black sexuality in pornography media and labor sites since the nineteenth century, Miller-Young's work contributes to the interdisciplinary study of Black sexual cultures. Her manuscript in progress, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in American Pornography examines the racialization of pornography as both a media form as well as a political economy where Black women's bodies are visualized, commodified, and consumed, and in which Black women themselves strategically labor. The study centralizes the negotiations of Black women sex workers in the adult entertainment industry and thinks carefully about the role of race in media technologies -from photography to film to video to digital media and the Internet- active in shaping American sexual culture.

Earning her Ph.D. in History from New York University, she has won numerous academic fellowships and awards, including the University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Grant in Women's Studies, and the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research Award. Professor Miller-Young has presented her work both nationally and internationally, including in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and Brazil.

Professor Miller-Young has recently published an essay in the feminist journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (April 2008) on Black women and "hip-hop pornography." She has also published in collections such as Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture, Blackness and Sexualities, and C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader. In addition, she has written essays for Feminist Theory, Colorlines, Cut-Up.com, and $pread, a sex worker magazine. She has been interviewed for numerous articles and books on Blacks in the sex industry, pornography, and the sexual culture of hip-hop, and has been a featured guest on NPR's "News and Notes" with Farai Chideya, as well as documentaries by Canada's SexTV and the UK's Channel 4.