Dr. Mireille Miller-Young speaks about the subjects we are often told are too difficult, too political, too intimate—or simply too uncomfortable—to talk about.

An award-winning author, cultural critic, and longtime professor of Feminist Studies, Dr. Miller-Young brings more than two decades of scholarship on race, sexuality, pleasure, representation, and power to audiences inside and outside the university. Her newest work extends these questions into artificial intelligence, technology, intimacy, creativity, and the changing boundaries of what it means to be human.

Her talks combine serious ideas with storytelling, humor, cultural criticism, and a willingness to stay with complicated questions rather than offer easy answers. She has spoken at universities and cultural institutions across the United States and internationally, and is equally at home delivering a keynote, joining a provocative panel, leading an intimate conversation, or engaging directly with an audience.

Speaking topics include:

• Race, Sex & Artificial Intelligence — What can Black feminist and sexuality studies teach us about AI, intimacy, bias, representation, and the futures we are building?

• Pleasure, Power & Erotic Freedom — Who gets to desire, whose pleasure matters, and what do sexuality and erotic life reveal about freedom and power?

• AI, Intimacy & the Human/Machine Boundary — What happens to love, sex, creativity, identity, and sexual ethics when people form increasingly intimate relationships with intelligent technologies?

• Race, Representation & Popular Culture — Reading film, pornography, visual culture, and media as sites where ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and power are made and contested.

• Black Feminism, Sexuality & the Politics of the Unsaid — What becomes visible when we take seriously the subjects, desires, people, and forms of knowledge that respectable conversation leaves out?

• Creative Freedom & the Courage to Become — On reinvention, intellectual freedom, curiosity, and imagining lives beyond the identities and expectations handed to us.

Dr. Miller-Young also develops talks and conversations specifically for universities, conferences, cultural institutions, technology organizations, creative industries, nonprofit and community groups, and other audiences.

Interested in inviting Dr. Mireille to speak?

Contact Dr. Mireille about a speaking engagement on her contact page.

The Sexual Representation Collection at University of Toronto Presents Mireille Miller-Young: The Black Erotic Archive

Join the Sexual Representation Collection at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies for its annual speaker series, featuring Mireille Miller-Young for a public lecture on The Black Erotic Archive.

The Black Erotic Archive is an image-based project that explores black erotic photography, film, and ephemera from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries. Over nearly two decades, Dr. Miller-Young has uncovered a wealth of images that will finally be brought to light. From 8mm stag films made by small time pornographers in Harlem during the Depression to amateur-photographers in the 1970s, these images form an archive-not-yet-made, exposing how, even as sexuality remains a site of expropriation and trauma, black people also use sexual images to present themselves in ways that displayed complex subjectivities, desires, and labors. Because no central repository of black sexual cultural production exists, we must ask: What does it mean to archive and curate black sex?

Keynotes

Dr. Miller-Young has given keynote presentations at several conferences and events, including:

• “The Black Erotic Archive”

  FilmForum 2021, XIX MAGIS International Film and Media Studies Spring School

  Università degli studi di Udine, Italy

• “A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography”
  Black Feminist Speaker Series
  University of Oregon

• “Telling Our Stories: Black Women’s Sex Work and the Ethics of Oral History”
  Scandal in Real Time: A National Conference on Black Women, Politics, and Oral History
  UC Irvine

• “The Politics of Pleasure: Black Women Beyond Respectability”
  Vassar College

• “The Politics of Pleasure: Black Women Pornography Filmmakers and Erotic Activism”
  At the Limit: Pornography and the Humanities, SUNY Buffalo

Previous Events

Miller-Young has also spoken at events hosted by various centers and universities including:

• Harvard University

• University of Toronto

• Institute for Network Cultures, Amsterdam

• University of Paris-Diderot

• University of London

• Universidad National de Educación a Distancia

• Washington University School of Law

• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• University of Oregon

• Denison University

• UC San Diego

• Boston University

• Cal Poly

• Vanderbilt University

• Vassar College

• University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• University of Oregon

• California College of the Arts, San Francisco

• UC Berkeley

• UC Los Angeles School of Law

• University of Illinois, Chicago

• SUNY Buffalo

• UC Riverside

• The Pennsylvania State University

• University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

• UC Santa Cruz

• The Ohio State University

• UC Irvine

• CatalystCon

• CineKink

• Desiree Alliance

• The Sex Workers Film and Art Festival

• Good Vibrations Se Summit