Margot Mifflin

Professor

Contact

margot.mifflin@lehman.cuny.edu
718-960-8371
Carman Hall 388

Education

B.A., Occidental College
M.A., New York University

Biography

Margot Mifflin is an author and journalist who writes about women’s history, pop culture, and the arts. She wrote the first history of women’s tattoo culture, Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo (PowerHouse Books, 1997, 2013). Her 2009 biography The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books) was a finalist for the Caroline Bancroft History Prize; it’s under option by MGMT Entertainment. Looking For Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood (Counterpoint Press, 2020) is a cultural history of the Miss America Pageant; it won the Popular Culture Association's Best Book in Women's Studies Award. Mifflin has served as an advisor on exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, The New York Historical Society, and The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and has lectured at colleges, museums and libraries nationwide.

Mifflin’s reporting, criticism, and personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Vice, Elle, ARTnews, Bookforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and The L.A. Times, among other publications. Along with teaching in the English Department at Lehman College, she’s a professor in the Arts Reporting Program at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where she served as program director during its first decade. In 2009, Mifflin received an Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Works award from Lehman College. Her courses include Arts Criticism, The Popular Essay, Tattoos in Literature, Beauty Pageants and National Identity, and Gender Issues in Popular Culture.

Mifflin received her B.A. in English from Occidental College and her M.A. in Journalism from New York University. Visit her website here.