Hannah Wohl

I am an associate professor of sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in culture, markets, gender and sexuality, theory, and ethnographic methods. My research analyzes judgment, valuation, and creativity in cultural markets. My first monograph, Bound by Creativity (University of Chicago Press, 2021), draws upon my in-depth ethnography of the New York City elite contemporary art world to examine how artists and other art market players make high-stakes creative and economic decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty. My current book project, Performance Anxiety, is based on my immersive fieldwork in the Los Angeles pornography and adult content creation industry. I explore how porn performers negotiate intimate, and potentially risky, interactions in their daily work. I have received awards for my writing from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. My research has been published in major social science journals, including Socio-Economic Review, Sociological Theory, Poetics, Qualitative Sociology, and Qualitative Research. I am currently Co-Editor-in-Chief of Poetics, the leading social science journal on media, culture, and the arts, and Chair-Elect of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Culture Section.