Hannah Wohl

Specialization:

Culture, markets, valuation, gender and sexuality, technology, sociological theory, ethnography

Education:

Ph.D., Northwestern University

Bio:

I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara, where I am the current Director of Graduate Studies. As a cultural and economic sociologist, I explore how people make judgments. I often use ethnography and other qualitative methods to analyze decision-making, valuation, and creativity in cultural fields.

My monograph, Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art is Created and Judged (University of Chicago Press, 2021), draws on my fieldwork in the elite New York City art world to examine how contemporary artists make high-stakes creative decisions under extreme uncertainty about what constitutes good art. My current book project, Performance Anxiety (under advance contract with Princeton University Press), relies on my ethnography of the Los Angeles pornography and adult content creation (OnlyFans) industry to explore how porn performers negotiate daily workplace sex and how digital infrastructures shape these fraught interactions and resulting cultural products. Other ongoing research projects include (a) an archival study of tenure dossiers to examine the construction and assessment of scholarly worth, (b) an interview study of voice-assistant device engineers to analyze how they conceive of anthropomorphic qualities in building artificial intelligence, and (3) a quantitative study on the global valuation of contemporary art.

I am Co-Editor-and-Chief of Poetics, Chair of the American Sociological Association Culture Section, and Chair Elect of the American Sociological Association Consumers and Consumption Section. My research has been published in leading sociology journals, including Sociological Theory, Socio-Economic Review, Poetics, Qualitative Sociology, Qualitative Research and recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association sections on Theory, Culture, and Consumers and Consumption, as well as the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. My recent public writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Hill, Fast Company, The Conversation, and Barron’s.

I hold a B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Before coming to UCSB, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University.

Selected Publications:

Book:

Wohl, Hannah. 2021. Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art is Created and Judged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  

Peer-Reviewed Articles: (* Denotes equal authorship)

Hanley, Margot, and Hannah Wohl*. 2025. “Producing Shifting Personhood: How Designers Anthropomorphize Artificial Intelligence.” Big Data and Society. (Accepted)

Wohl, Hannah, and Max Besbris. 2024. “Relational Brokerage: Interaction and Valuation in Two Markets.” Qualitative Sociology 47: 1-21.

Wohl, Hannah. 2022. “Innovation and Creativity in Creative Industries.” Sociology Compass. DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12956.

Wohl, Hannah. 2021. “Mapping Multivocality: How Critics Communicate Complex Meaning Through Metaphor.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. DOI: 10.1057/s41290-021-00143-0.

Buchholz, Larissa, Gary Alan Fine, and Hannah Wohl*. 2020. “Art Markets in Crisis: How Personal Bonds and Market Subcultures Mediate the Effects of COVID‑19.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. DOI: 10.1057/s41290-020-00119-6.

Wohl, Hannah. 2020. “Performing Aesthetic Confidence: How Contemporary Art Collectors Maintain Status.” Socio-Economic Review 18(1): 215-233.

Wohl, Hannah. 2019. “Creative Visions: Presenting Aesthetic Trajectories in Artistic Careers.” Poetics. DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2019.03.003.

Fine, Gary Alan, and Hannah Wohl. 2018. “Reading and Reputation: Sense, Sensibility, and Status in Graduate Education.” Qualitative Research 18(5): 554–564.

Wohl, Hannah, and Gary Alan Fine. 2017. “The Active Skim: Efficient Reading as a Moral Challenge in Post-Graduate Education.” Teaching Sociology 45(3):220-227.

Wohl, Hannah. 2017. “Somatic Security: Negotiating Appropriateness in Sexualized Interactions.” Qualitative Sociology 40(2):237-257.

Wohl, Hannah, and Gary Alan Fine. 2017. “Reading Rites: Teaching Textwork in Graduate Education.” The American Sociologist 48(2):215-232.

Wohl, Hannah. 2015. “Community Sense: The Cohesive Power of Aesthetic Judgment.” Sociological Theory 33(4):299-326.

Griswold, Wendy, and Hannah Wohl*. 2015. “Evangelists of Culture: One Book Programs and the Agents who Define Literature, Shape Tastes, and Reproduce Regionalism.” Poetics 50:96-109. 

Downloads of my articles are available on https://ucsb.academia.edu/HannahWohl.

Public Writing:

Wohl, Hannah. 2025. “The Market’s Judgment on OnlyFans Has Nothing to Do with Money.”  Barron’s, September 20.

Cameron, Lindsey, Julia Ticona, and Hannah Wohl. 2025. “The Hidden Dangers of Eliminating Taxes on Tips.” July 24.

Wohl, Hannah. 2025. “Americans have been Dangerously Misled about Porn Age-Verification Laws.” The Hill. June 24.

Wohl, Hannah. 2025. “Deepfake Porn is a Labor Issue.” Fast Company. April 9.

Wohl, Hannah, and Lindsey Cameron. 2025. “Unlikely Bedfellows: How Platform Companies Shortchange Porn Performers and Ride-Hailing Drivers Alike.” The Conversation. January 7.
 

Courses:

My main teaching areas include courses on creative industries, culture, sociological theory, and the research process.