Mireille Miller-Young

Mireille Miller-Young is an American academic who is an associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research explores race, gender, and sexuality in visual culture and sex industries in the United States. Miller-Young holds a PhD in American History from New York University. She describes herself as an "academic pornographer", a term originally adopted by Sander Gilman.

Career

A Taste for Brown Sugar Miller-Young's 2004 thesis, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, examines the history of black women in pornography with ethnographic methods. The dissertation was published as a book in 2014, which was well-received. It has been described as a "must-read" building on the work of feminist scholars such as Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, and Celine Parreñas Shimizu.

In 2015, It won the National Women's Studies Association Sara A. Whaley Book Prize and American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Publication Prize.

Academics Miller-Young is an associate professor of feminist studies and an affiliate professor in film and media studies, Black studies, history, and comparative literature at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Her current projects include the Black Erotic Archive project and the Sex Worker Oral History Project. She pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 108 hours of community service and three years of probation. She was also ordered to pay restitution and attend anger management classes.

The case attracted widespread attention. The UCSB Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, Michael Young, published a letter on the incident that was interpreted as a rebuke to both sides involved in the altercation.