Laura J. Miller
Assistant Professor of Sociology
email: lamiller@brandeis.edu
(CV)
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Focus of Research Sociology of Culture, Mass Media, Consumption and Marketing, Book Industry, Urban and Suburban Studies. Education Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, 1998 M.L.I.S., University of California, Berkeley, 1987 B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1984. |
Laura J. Miller is an Assistant Professor of Sociology. She came to Brandeis in 2002, having previously taught at the University of Western Ontario and Vassar College. Professor Miller teaches courses in the sociology of culture, the mass media, and urban sociology.
Her research brings together several sets of interests: the intersection of cultural and economic factors within information industries, the cultural meanings attached to marketing and consumption, and the role of commercial institutions in community life. Her 2006 book, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, is on book marketing and retailing in the twentieth century, with a focus on the growth of large, corporate-owned chain bookstores. She is currently working on a project that examines the relationship between the health/natural foods industry and natural foods as a social and cultural movement.
See Professor Miller’s "Major Publishers' Holdings," a Who Owns Whom guide to the publishing industry, at people.brandeis.edu/~lamiller/publishers.html.
Recent Publications
Books
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Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption. University of Chicago Press, 2006. |
Selected Articles
"Selling the Product." In A History of the Book in America, Volume 5: The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson. (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
"The Rise and Not-Quite-Fall of the American Book Wholesaler." (Journal of Media Economics, 2003)
"Saving Books from the Market: Price Maintenance Policies in the United States and Europe." In Citizenship and Participation in the Information Age, edited by Manjunath Pendakur and Roma Harris (Garamond Press, 2002)
"Publishing as Medium." In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Elsevier, 2001)
"The Best-Seller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction." (Book History, 2000)
"Shopping for Community: The Transformation of the Bookstore Into a Vital Community Institution." (Media, Culture and Society, 1999)
"Cultural Authority and the Use of New Technology in the Book Trade." (Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, 1999)