About

Miranda Joseph teaches feminist and queer studies, cultural studies, and American studies. Her scholarship uses the tools of cultural studies to theorize the relationship between economic processes and social formations.

She is the author of Debt to Society: Accounting for Life Under Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), which explores modes of accounting as they are used to create, sustain, or transform social relations, and Against the Romance of Community (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), which examines the supplementary relation of community with capitalism in the context of political debates over LGBT art and culture and the discourses and practices of NGOs.

At the University of Minnesota, Miranda Joseph serves as Chair of the Department of American Studies and is the former Chair of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies (2017-2020). At the University of Arizona where she was on the faculty from 1995-2017, she held numerous administrative and faculty leadership roles. Those roles included chairing the Strategic and Budget Advisory Committee, directing Graduate Studies in the Gender & Women’s Studies Department (a department which she has also chaired), and building and leading the Institute for LGBT Studies.

Invested in community-engaged scholarship and interdisciplinary pedagogy, Joseph has served on the governing boards of the Cultural Studies Association and the American Studies Association, and has a long history raising and managing large budgets for interdisciplinary projects.

Joseph received her PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1995.