Education:
1996 Ph.D. Columbia University, New York, New York. Department of Sociology. Awarded with Distinction.
1993 M.A. Columbia University, New York, New York. Department of Sociology.
1990 M.I.A. Columbia University, New York, New York. School of International and Public Affairs.
1987 B.A. Franklin and Marshall College. Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Academic Positions:
2014-2015 Director, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Middlebury College,
2016-2018 Middlebury, Vermont.
2019-Present
2017- Present Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Middlebury College,
Middlebury, Vermont.
Fall 2015 Visiting Professor, Gender Studies, European University at St.
Petersburg, Russia.
Graduate Seminar Taught (in Russian with Anna Temkina) on Gender
Theory: Intersectionality
2006-2016 Assistant and then Associate Professor of Sociology and Women & Gender Studies, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont.
Undergraduate courses: “Topics in Sociological Theory,” “Social Psychology,” “Sociology of Gender,” “Sociology of Freakishness,” “Sociology of Heterosexuality,” “Feminist Blogging,” and “White People.”
2003-2006 Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont.
Undergraduate courses: “Foundations of Sociological Theory,” “Social Problems,” “Sociology of Heterosexuality,” “Sociology of Freakishness.” : “Social Problems,” “Sociology of Heterosexuality,” “Sociology of Pleasure,” “Introduction to LGBTQ Studies,” “Introduction to Sociology,” and an independent study on the “Sociology of Sport.”
2000-2001 Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology & Lesbian and Gay Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Undergraduate courses: “A Sociology of Pleasure,” “Introduction to Lesbian and Gay Studies,” “A Sociology of Heterosexuality.” Organized a lecture series on “The Power of Pleasure.”
2000 Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sociology, Barnard College, New York, New York. Undergraduate courses taught: “Gender and Deviance,” “Gender, Class, and Race.”
1996-1997 Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, New York, New York.
Undergraduate courses: “Gender and Deviance,” “The Sociological Imagination.”
Graduate course: “Sociology of Gender.”
1995 Instructor of Sociology, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.
Undergraduate courses: “Sexuality and Gender.”
1991-1993 Teaching Assistant, Columbia University, New York, New York.
Undergraduate courses: “Sociology of Gender,” “Sociology of Culture.”
Honors and Awards:
2022 Ada Howe Kent grant. Working with Professor Patricia Saldarriaga for a new course on "Decolonizing Porn: Circulating Desire Between Europe and the Americas." Research in Madrid, Spain and New York, New York.
2019 New England Humanities Scholar Recipient. Gave presentations and met with students at three universities, Dartmouth, Tufts, and Northeastern in February 2019. Talks included “Love, Inc.: Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding, and Chasing the Happily Never After” and “Queer in Russia: From Peretstroika to Putin.”
One Middlebury Grant. Worked with my counterparts in the Middlebury language school in Madrid to strengthen gender studies offerings and the connections between the two campuses. I was also able to study Spanish intensively at an institute for three weeks with the grant.
Invited Speaker for Presidential Plenary at the Association for Slavic and East European Studies (San Francisco, CA, November 25) on “Illuminating the Darkness: Practices of Belief and Disbelief.” My talk was entitled: “I believe in Lesbians: Homo-optimism in Putin’s Russia”
2015 Fulbright Scholar. Taught a graduate seminar at European University at St. Petersburg in the Gender Studies Program (in Russian). Continued to help supervise and advise PHD students. Brought in scholars from the US to participate in the program.
2014 Whiting Foundation Grant to travel to Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia to collaborate with gender studies colleagues there.
2011-12 Mellon Foundation Grant, received with Sujata Moorti for a multi-college initiative on “Queering the Curriculum.”
2007 Feminist of the Year Award, Chellis House, Middlebury College.
2006 Rainbow Award for Leadership with LGBTQ students at University of Vermont.
1997 Harriman Institute for Post-Soviet Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, Columbia University, New York, New York.
1995 Social Science Research Council Dissertation Writing Grant.
1994 International Research and Exchange (IREX) board (supported by the National Endowment for Humanities) Dissertation Research Grant, 1994.
1991-1993 Lazarsfeld Fellowship, Columbia University, New York, New York.
1988-1990 Dean’s Fellowship, Columbia University, New York, New York.
1987 Phi Beta Kappa.
Graduate Students:
2020 Acted as reader as well as “Opponent” at the defense of Anna Avdeeva, “Natural Parenting in Contemporary Russia: When ‘Nature’ Meets Kinship,” University of Helsinki, Faculty of the Arts, PHD
2020 Reader and committee for Fran Yost “Experiencing Perestroika at the Margins: Gay and Lesbian Lives in the Soviet Union and Russian Federation, 1985-2000, “ Department of History, University of Illinois, ABD defense.
2016 Veronika Lapina, “Queer Nomads: in-country mobility of sexual becomings in Russia,” European University at St. Petersburg, PHD, Gender Studies
Books:
1999 Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Queer in Russia was the first book-length academic study of sexual otherness in Russia. I used extensive field research (e.g. interviews, surveys, participant observation) and cultural analysis (e.g. of theater, music, graffiti) to examine how Russian queers imagine themselves and how they are imagined in Russian culture at large.
2010 American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards and Our Quest for Perfection (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). This book explores the intersection of plastic identities with a plastic (credit-based) economy and the plastic surgery industry. I argue that the American belief in infinite malleability blended together with an obsession with the “beauty project” and how all of this has been fueled by changes in the economy, specifically the easier and easier access to credit even as incomes for most Americans have declined.
2019 Love, Inc. Dating Apps, Big White Weddings, and Chasing the Happily Neverafter (Berkeley: UC Press).
The notion of “happily ever after” has been ingrained in many of us since childhood—meet someone, date, have the big white wedding, and enjoy your well-deserved future. I invite readers to flip our feelings about Romance and see it for what it really is—an ideology that we desperately cling to as a way to cope with the fact that we believe we cannot control or affect the societal, economic, and political structures around us. From climate change, nuclear war, white nationalism to the worship of wealth and conspicuous consumption—as the future becomes seemingly less secure, Americans turn away from the public sphere and find shelter in the private. I argue that when we do this, we allow Romance to blind us to the real work that needs to be done—building global movements that inspire a change in government policies to address economic and social inequality.
Current The Road to Hell: How Good Intentions Make Things Worse. In this book, I try to sort through the affective turn in theory and in activism to argue that structure matters far more than intentions and that unless we radically alter the structures, we will continue to find ourselves living in a world with little or no change. I use a variety of “case studies” to show that our feelings do not matter nearly as much as structure. Case studies include straight women celebrating bachelorette parties in gay spaces and thereby destroying them to extremely progressive white people ignoring symbols of the confederacy at a local high school in order not to offend anyone. Throughout I try to acknowledge that most of us don’t mean to make things worse, but as long as we refuse to acknowledge that structures must change and that wanting things to be better is not going to make them better, we will continue to see white supremacy, homophobia and misogyny flourishing even in the most progressive spaces.
Special Issues:
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. Special issue co-edited with Sujata Moorti. “Queering Liberal Arts” explores whether queer theory can find a place in the increasingly monetized realm of knowledge by showcasing how queer theory can infuse other disciplines with new, queerer ways of seeing. Summer 2016.
Book Chapters and Articles
2023. “Witch-Ins and Other Feminist Acts,” with Tina Escaja in Witch Studies, Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward, eds., (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
2022 “Romance and Other Threats to Our Future” invited chapter in Introducing the New Sexuality Studies: Original Essays, Nancy Fischer, Laurel Westbrook, Steven Seidman, eds. (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2022)
2021 “Belief in Hopeless Times: The Once and Future Lesbian in Putin’s Russia and Beyond,” QED, accepted forthcoming.
“Lesbian, feminist, TERF: A queer attack on feminist studies,”with Carly Thomsen, Journal of Lesbian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2021.1950270
2019 “A Cold War for the 21st Century: Homosexualism vs. Heterosexualism,” with Alexander Kondakov, in Richard Mole, ed. Post- Soviet Sexualities (London: Routledge).
2016 “’All the World was There’ and Other White Lies of the Royal Wedding of Kate and William,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Summer 2016.
“Communism in Russia,” The Wiley Blackwell Encyolopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies 1-2 (March 2016).
2014 “Bury their hearts: thoughts on the homosexual spectre haunting Russia, QED, Vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 2014 (NB: article based on my Russian article “Serdtsa geev nado zaryvat” with updated information and written for a North American/Western European audience in mind) “’Serdtsa geev nado zaryvat’ v zemliiu’: pazmyshleniia ob okhote na gomoseksyalov v Rossii,” Na pereput’e: metodoloiia, teoriia I praktika LGBT I kvir-iccledovanii (Sankt-Peterburg: Tsentr nezavicimykh sotsiologicheskikh issledovanii, 2014)
2011-2012
“What if Marriage is Bad for Us?” with Lynn Owens (from the Chronicle of Higher Education, September, 2010 ) in: Feminist Frontiers, Verta Taylor, Leyla Rupp, and Nancy Whittier, eds. McGraw Hill, 2011. Also, in the Sixth Edition of Cases and Materials on Family Law, Foundation Press, of Thomson Reuters, 2012.
2008 “Phallus Envy,” Journal of Lesbian Studies, 12:1.
2008 Foreword to Love has Four Arms, by Lida Yusopova and Margarita Meklina in Russian, Kver, Moskva.
2008 Foreword to How did a Sexual Minorities Movement Emerge by Mikhael Nemtsev, Vdm Vertag, Saarbrucken, Germany.
2007 “Burlesque Then and Now,” Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender (Farmington Hills, Michigan: Thomson Gale)
2005 “The Pleasure of Freaks,” Proteus, Fall.
2004 “The Mermaid and the Heterosexual Imagination,” Thinking Straight: The Power, Promise, and Paradox of Heterosexuality, Chrys Ingraham, ed. (New York, Routledge).
2003 “I Miss Lesbian Reproductive Sex,” in Jennifer Foote Sweeney, Life as We Know It, (New York: Washington Square Press).
1998 “Queer Subjects and Subjecitivites” in Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev. Adele Barker, ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
1993 “Perestroika for Women?” in Perestroika from Below, Judith Seditis and James Butterfield, eds. (Boulder: Westview Press).
Book Reviews:
2015 Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities. In Slavic Review (vol. 74, no. 4, Winter 2015)
Media and the Rhetoric of Body Perfection by Deborah Harris-Moore. In Cultural Sociology (9:3, 2015)
Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine and Identity by Liberty Walther Barners. In Medical Humanities (October 2015)
2008 Dude, You’re a Fag by C.J. Pascoe. In Social Forces, 86, no. 4, 1859-1861.
2008 Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category by David Valentine. In American Journal of Sociology, November (vol. 114, no. 3).
2008 Sexuality and Gender in Postcommunist Eastern Europe and Russia by Aleksandar Stulhofer and Theo Sandfort, eds. In Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 17, Number 3, September.
2002 Eros and Pornography in Russian Culture by M. Levitt and A Torporkov, eds. In Slavic Review.
2001 Transmen and FTMs by Jason Cromwell in American Journal of Sociology.
1998 Cracks in the Iron Closet by David Tuller in Journal of Homosexuality.
Popular Press Commentary and Consultation
2022 “Tax the Rich (Universities)!” Inside Higher Ed, February 11, 2022.
2020 with Jamie McCallum, “An Opportunity to Reimagine Higher Education,” Vermont Digger, June 14,
2020. “On Being Karen,” Medium, July 6, 2020.
2019 Consultant to Story Corps on the 50th Anniversary “Remembering Stonewall” series.
“Sorry, love isn’t all we need. A Valentine’s Day Downer,” New York Daily News
2018 “Fewer People Are Getting Married. Here’s Why,” NBC THINK,
2018 Contributor to The Conversation:
"Why are fewer and fewer Americans fixing their noses?"
"In the US Fairytale Royal Weddings Clash with Reality"
2017-2020 Contributor to Ms. Magazine Blog
“Gender Studies Will Destroy (Save) the World”
“A Mass Lesbian Wedding at the End of the World”
“Brett Kavanaugh and the Creation of the Rapist”
“Radical Romance: Examining Our Disruptive Affection for AOC”
“Resistance Over Romance”
“Wishing You a Radical Wedding Season”
“The Men are Not All Right”
“Megxit and the Death of Fairy Tale Romance,”
2016 “A Conversation with Sociologist Laurie Essig,” The Chauncey DeVega Show, May 2016. http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2016/05/a-conversation-with-sociologist-laurie.html
2012-
2016 Regular commentator on HuffPo Live:
“Mount Holyoke Bans Vagina Monologues”
“Prince Industrial Complex”
“Straight Men More Depressed than Gay Men”
2013-
present Regular commentator on WCAX The: 30.
DOMA rulings role in evolution of marriage
Professor Explains the Fascination with Freakishness
2012-present Contributor to “The Conversation” at the Chronicle of Higher Education, September.
2010- 2016 “Love, Inc.” a blog at Psychology Today.
2012- 2013 Blogger at Forbes.
2010- 2012 “Brainstorm” contributor at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
2008-2010 “Class Warfare” at True/Slant.
2003-2004 Contributor to Legal Affairs.
2003-2004 Contributor to NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
1998-2002 Regular contributor to Salon magazine.
2001-2002 Contributing Editor to 7 Days Vermont.
Recent Journalistic Essays
2018 “In the US, fairy-tale weddings clash with reality,” The Conversation,
May 17, 2018.
“Hate Crimes Won’t End Until Toxic ‘Bro’ Culture is Reformed,” The
Chronicle of Higher Education, Apri 8, 2018.
“Why are fewer and fewer Americans fixing their noses?” The
Conversation, April 5, 2018.
2017 “Talking Past Each Other on Free Speech,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 15, 2017.
2016 with Suzanna Danuta Walters. “4 Ways to Keep the Peace When Your Partner Is Voting for Hillary- or Bernie,” The Nation, April 18, 2016.
2015 “We’ve Got Gender All Wrong,” Medium, September 14, 2015.
“Russia, Land of Free Speech,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 11, 2015.
2014 “Avoiding Speech Slippery Slope,” The New York Times,
May 19, 2014.
“Queer Russia,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February.
2013 “How Russia’s Science of Sex Threatens Gays,” the Washington Post, August 11.
“It’s MOOAs, Not MOOCs, That Will Transform Higher Ed,” the Chronicle of Higher Education, March.
“Profs Fail iEtiquette 101,” the Chronicle of Higher Education, February.
2011 “In Plastic We Trust: America’s Love of Cosmetic Surgery and Credit Cards,” the Washington Post, January 7.
“How Reaganomics Fueled the Boob Job Boom, “ The Atlantic, January 18.
2009 “What if Marriage is Bad for Us?” with Lynn Owens, the Chronicle of Higher Education, September.
“Ordinary Ugliness: The Hidden Cost of the Credit Crunch,” the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Selected Recent Presentations:
2019 “I believe in lesbians: homo-optimism in Putin’s Russia,” invited Presidential Plenary Address, Association for the Study of East European, Slavic and Eurasian Studies, Annual Conference, San Francisco, CA.”
2016 “Love Inc., On the strange marriage of romance and neoliberal capitalism,” Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas, Universidad Complutense de Mardrid, Madrid, Spain.
2015 “American Plastic: How Neoliberal Economic Policies Shaped Our Bodies,” Moscow State University, Philosophy Faculty (Part of the Festival of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, October 2015
“Love, Inc.: The strange marriage of romance and Neoliberal Capitalism,” The European University at St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia, November 2015.
2014 “Love, Inc.” Ted X Main Conference, Vienna, Austria.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l0sZrrWlrU)
2013 “’We Should Bury Their Hearts’: Thoughts on the Spectre of Homosexuality Haunting Russia,” Keynote at Conference on Queer Studies in Russia, St. Petersburg, Russia.
2013 “Forbes, Fired, Feminism! Mass shootings, masculinity and the media” American Studies Conference, Washington, DC.
2013 “Celebrity Weddings,” Eastern Sociological Society, Boston, MA, March.
2011 Common Hour Speaker, “American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards and Our Quest for Perfection,” Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, September.
2011 “Manning Up: Thoughts on Sports, Sex and Power,” Middlebury College Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition of Mixed Signals, March 2.
2011 Keynote, “Coloring Outside the Lines: Creative Approaches to Queer Sociology,” a mini-conference in conjunction with the 2011 Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting,” February 24.
2010 “Love is in the Air: Romance as Ideology,” University of East London, London, UK, February.
2010 “Global Plastic: How the American Quest for the Perfect Body Infected the World,” “What’s Your Gender and How Do You Know?” and “The Mirror and the Porn Star,” University College London, London UK, January-February.
2009 “American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and the Spirit of Our Time,” and “Queer Theory: An Epistemology” at Lafayette College, Easton, PA, October.
2008 “American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and the Spirit of Our Time,” The British Museum, London, UK, October.
2008 “The Mirror and the Porno Star: Ideal Forms, Everyday Aesthetics and Cosmetic Surgery,” Leeds University, Leeds, UK, July.
2008 “Weber’s Charisma as Sexual Potentialities or Why Obama Will Be Our Nominee,” Association of American Geographers Convention, Boston, MA, April.
2007 “Plastic Surgery TV and the Implantation of Surgical Desires,” Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, October.
2007 “The Cultural Economy of Plastic,” Manchester University, Manchester, UK, September.
2007 “Plasticity: On the Queer Uses of Plastic Surgery,” Leeds University, Leeds, UK, September.
Community Service:
2020- President, Americans Association of University Professors, Middlebury College.
2011-
2014 Secretary/Treasurer American Association of University Professors, Middlebury College.
2011-
2013 Appeals Committee, Chair, Middlebury College.
2012-13 Chaired curriculum review and move to three concentrations, Sociology/Anthropology.
2007/08 &
2010-11 Thesis Director, Sociology/Anthropology Department, Middlebury College.
2010-11 Admissions Advisory Committee, Middlebury College.
2008-2012 Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) steering committee.
2006-
present Women and Gender Studies (now Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies) Steering Committee, Middlebury College.
2008-
present Queer Studies House Faculty Committee, Middlebury College.
2007-08 Faculty Working Group on Diversity Initiatives, Middlebury College.
2005-06 Commissioner, President’s Commission on LGBT Issues, University of Vermont.
Member faculty committee for Sexuality and Gender Identity Studies, University of Vermont, Fall 2004-Fall 2006.
Outside reviewer for American Ethnologist, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Homosexuality, American Journal of Sociology, GLQ, Journal of Time, Journal of Communication Inquiry and Society, Signs, QED, Whiteness and Education, Journal of Lesbian Studies, as well as Fulbright, National Science Foundation, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, and Duke University Press.
Recent Professional Service
External Review, Gender Studies Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA 2019
External Review, Gender Studies at Albion College, Albion, MI 2020
Review for Fulbright Scholars going to Russia with a focus on Gender Studies, November 2021
Recent Feminist Community Engagement
2016- Feminists Against BS has engaged in a variety of performances and educational events including five annual Witch-Ins and Trumpkin Smashings, a Public Panic Attack, creating a “Vulva Detox Tent” at the Ecolab Culture Conference at University of Vermont in 2018 “Feverish World.” In 2020, FABS participated in Julia Alvarez’s Scheherazade Project. For more information about FABS, see here.
2019 Fundraiser and book reading (Love, Inc.) for Planned Parenthood NNE and Womensafe at local Middlebury business.