Bio

Mireille Miller-Young, PhD, is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Earning her doctorate at New York University, Dr. Miller-Young is an interdisciplinary historian, ethnographer, archivist, and public intellectual. A winner of the of the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, the UC Regents Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and the Distinguished Teaching Award at UC Santa Barbara, among many other distinctions, she researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in US history, popular and film cultures, and the sex industries. 

Her book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for Best Book on Women and Labor by the National Women’s Studies Association, and the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book by the American Studies Association. ATFBS, which was based on 12 years of ethnographic research in LA’s porn industry and is now being taught widely at universities in the US and abroad, was the first book to examine the history of black women’s performances and labors in the adult film industry, opening up a whole new area of research on racialized sexuality sex work, sexual economies, porn, and in popular cultures.

With Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Tristan Taormino, Dr. Miller-Young is an editor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (The Feminist Press, 2013), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology and has been translated into German (2014) and Spanish (2016). She is also lead editor of the recently published collection Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (University of Illinois Press, 2019). Dr. Miller-Young is busy working on several new projects, including The Black Erotic Archive, based on her groundbreaking research into photography, film, and other media featuring black sexualities, and HEAUX: Hustling, Hypersexuality, and the Black Erotic Imagination.

Dr. Miller-Young was a co-convener of the Black Sexual Economies Project, a multi-year working group at Washington University School of Law’s Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work and Social Capital, and is a founder and co-convener of the New Sexualities Research Initiative at UC Santa Barbara. She has also founded the Sex Worker Oral History Project, funded by the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Adult Media Archive at UC Santa Barbara’s Davidson Library. An original member of The Black Feminist Think Tank, Dr. Miller-Young works in and beyond the academy, for instance serving in an advisory role for the Best Practices Policy Project (BPPP), the Sex Worker Media Library, and the Black Sex Worker Collective (BSWC).

Dr. Miller-Young has published in numerous anthologies, academic journals, and news outlets including Porn Archives, Queer Sex Work, Blackness and Sexualities, New Views on Pornography, Pornification, Feminist Theory, Sexualities, Meridians, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Colorlines, Ms., Coming Out Like a Porn Star, and $pread, a sex worker magazine. She is a member of the editorial boards for the peer-reviewed academic journals Porn Studies, Signs, and Screening Sex, and for the Feminist Media Book Series at University of Illinois Press.

The 2019-2020 Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University, Dr. Mireille Miller-Young is often interviewed for books, articles, radio programs, and documentaries, such as NPR’s News and Notes, PRI’s Marketplace, UK’s Channel 4, Canada’s SexTV, Sex Out Loud Radio, Fucking While Feminist, XBIZ, La Repubblica, HuffPost Live, Publisher’s Weekly, For Harriet, and Ms. She particularly enjoyed being a featured expert for the Netflix docu-show Explained: The Female Orgasm. A sought after speaker at many universities, including Harvard University, Oxford University, Boston University, University of Toronto, University of Amsterdam, UMASS Amherst, University of Oregon, The Ohio State University, UCLA, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois at Chicago, Cal Poly, Cal Arts, and Indiana University, Dr. Miller-Young also enjoys speaking at sex education and advocacy conferences like CatalystCon, CineKink, Desiree Alliance, and the Good Vibrations Sex Summit.

Passionate about research, teaching, institution building, social justice, and outreach to communities beyond the academy, Mireille Miller-Young is a black feminist theorist, educator, and activist committed to challenging and transforming the public dialogue about race, gender, sex, and power. A first generation college student and daughter of a hard working single mom, Miller-Young grew up in New York’s Lower East Side and is a proud alumna of the George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania, Emory University, and New York University. Now a mom of two young sons, she is a fan of 70s & 80s music, fantasy and sci-fi (books, tv, and film), art and design, soul food, podcasts, public radio, protests, and glittery things.