About Me

Dr. Mireille Miller-Young is an award-winning author, cultural critic, speaker, and scholar who has spent more than two decades asking difficult questions about race, sexuality, power, pleasure, and representation.

An Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Dr. Miller-Young is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work crosses Black feminist theory, history, ethnography, archival research, film and visual culture, sexuality studies, and digital technology. Increasingly, her work also turns toward artificial intelligence and the urgent cultural questions emerging around intimacy, identity, embodiment, creativity, representation, and power.

Dr. Miller-Young is the author of the widely acclaimed A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Duke University Press), winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book in American Studies and the Sara A. Whaley Prize for scholarship on women and labor. Based on twelve years of archival and ethnographic research, A Taste for Brown Sugar was the first book-length study of Black women’s performances, labor, and representation in the adult film industry. The book opened new conversations about race and pornography, sexual labor, Black women’s sexualities, erotic representation, and the complicated relationship between pleasure, power, exploitation, and agency.

She is also co-editor, with Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Tristan Taormino, of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, a Lambda Literary Award finalist subsequently published in German and Spanish translation, and lead editor of Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital. Much of Dr. Miller-Young’s work begins with what has been left out: people, images, practices, and forms of knowledge that conventional archives and institutions have dismissed, stigmatized, or refused to preserve.

She hasn’t only written about these archival absences. For two decades, she has worked to build archives and projects that address them. She co-founded the Adult Media Archive at UC Santa Barbara and is currently developing The Black Erotic Archive, a print and digital archive. She helped convene collaborative projects including the Black Sexual Economies Project at Washington University School of Law and UCSB’s New Sexualities Research Initiative, creating spaces for scholars, artists, activists, and communities to think together across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

Dr. Miller-Young’s work has been recognized through numerous awards, fellowships, and residencies, including UC Santa Barbara’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, the UC Regents Humanities Faculty Fellowship, a fellowship at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, and a visiting fellowship at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin.

But her work has never belonged only to the university.

Her writing and cultural criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., Colorlines, GLQ, Meridians, and numerous books, journals, and other publications. She has appeared as an expert commentator across television, radio, podcasts, and documentary film, including NPR’s Marketplace, Netflix’s Explained and History of Swear Words, Discovery+, and documentary projects for Severin Films.

As curator of UC Santa Barbara’s Black Hollywood film series, she creates public conversations about race, storytelling, filmmaking, representation, and cultural power. Her guests have included Kemp Powers (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Soul), RaMell Ross (Nickel Boys), Juel Taylor (They Cloned Tyrone), Yoruba Richen (The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks), and Akin McKenzie (The Woman King). She has also spoken to audiences at universities and cultural institutions in the United States and internationally, bringing scholarly depth to conversations about subjects that are often sensationalized, oversimplified, or avoided altogether.

Now, Dr. Miller-Young is taking the questions that have animated her scholarship for more than two decades beyond the university and into public life: Who gets to desire? Who gets to be free? What are we afraid to say aloud? And what becomes possible when we unapologetically imagine ourselves differently?

Through speaking, writing, media, consulting, curation, and original creative work, she brings scholarship, humor, storytelling, and cultural criticism together to explore race, sexuality, intimacy, technology, pleasure, power, and the unruly possibilities of becoming.

Increasingly, her work turns toward artificial intelligence and what our relationships with intelligent technologies reveal about us: our desires and fears, our assumptions about intelligence and personhood, our ideas about creativity and intimacy, and our persistent inequalities. Who gets represented in the futures we are building? Whose knowledge shapes them? And what happens to identity, intimacy, eroticism, and sexual ethics when the boundaries between human and machine that we thought were fixed begin to move?

These questions are part of a larger public project for Dr. Miller-Young: creating spaces where intellectual seriousness lives alongside curiosity, experimentation, humor, pleasure, and play—where conversations that are usually separated can collide and mingle in unexpected ways.

A native New Yorker raised on the Lower East Side, Mireille was a first-generation college student before becoming a professor, author, and professional asker of questions people sometimes wish she wouldn’t ask. She earned her undergraduate degree from Emory University and her PhD from New York University. She loves science fiction and fantasy, art and design, soul food, 70s and 80s music, beautiful objects, strange ideas, and glittery things.

She believes rigorous thinking should never be joyless, serious ideas don’t have to be boring, and some of the most important questions are waiting for us precisely where we’ve been told not to look.