Margot Mifflin is an author and journalist who writes about women’s history and the arts. She wrote the first history of women’s tattoo culture, Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, and The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman. Her new book, Looking For Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood, is the first feminist cultural history of the Miss America pageant. Margot’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Vice, Elle, ARTnews, Bookforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, O, The Oprah Magazine, The New Yorker.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and other publications.
Margot is an English professor at Lehman College/CUNY and teaches arts journalism at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She’s served as a consultant on exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, The New York Historical Society, and The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and she curated the exhibition “Body Electric” at Ricco/Maresca Gallery.
Margot has appeared as a lecturer and keynote speaker at colleges, universities and museums nationally, including Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Los Angeles MOCA, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, The Heard Museum, and The Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She’s been a guest on Katie Couric’s show, Katie; on The Leonard Lopate Show; on the podcast Talk Nerdy; and on many public radio stations. She’s discussed her work at book clubs, tattoo conventions, literary festivals, a country club, a social club for women with autism, and in public schools.
“Let me be the first to say wow – that was such a captivating lecture! You delivered it [on Beauty Pageants and National Identity] with such an amazing flow of storytelling, and I’m left feeling absolutely delighted that you were our first lecturer of the year – thank you so much!” — The Feminist Lecture Program (UK)
