Topics she can discuss include:

• Queer studies
• Plastic surgery & economics
• Pop culture
• Sociology, gender, and sexuality
• Critical race

Video: Recession & Plastic Surgery

About Laurie Essig

Laurie Essig joined the Middlebury faculty in 2006. She teaches courses in social theory, sociology of gender, sociology of freakishness, and sociology of heterosexuality. She also teaches a course at Middlebury called, "White People."

She is a blogger for Forbes online.

Her newest book, "American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and Our Quest for Perfection," (Beacon, 2010) is a critique of neoliberal capitalism through cosmetic surgery.

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 show as the source of American popular culture as well as the importance of mermaids in structuring the heterosexual 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," The Washington Post, and Legal Affairs.

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