About

Miranda Joseph teaches feminist, Marxist, poststructuralist and queer theory, cultural studies methods, and LGBT 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.

Prior to serving as Chair of the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota (2017-2020), she held numerous administrative and faculty leadership roles at the University of Arizona, where she was on the faculty from 1995-2017. 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, one of the very few university institutes in the country committed to advancing LGBT studies and activism.

Invested in community-engaged scholarship and interdisciplinary pedagogy, Joseph has held executive roles in 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.