Laurie Essig: Plastic Surgery and Economics

Laurie Essig is an assistant professor in sociology at Middlebury College. She joined the  faculty in 2006. She teaches courses in social theory, sociology of gender, sociology of freakishness, and sociology of heterosexuality.

Essig is the author of “Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other” (Duke University Press, 1999).  She has written on the freak shows as the source of American popular culture as well as the importance of mermaids in structuring the hetoersexual imagination in academic publications. She is also the author of  a variety of personal essays in places as varied as Salon, NPR's "All Things Considered," and Legal Affairs.

She is working on a book tentatively titled “Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and the Spirit of America,” that looks at the intersection of plastic surgery with a plastic (credit) driven economy.

Essig graduated from Franklin and Marshall College and received her M.I.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Columbia University.