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Dr. Jody Miller specializes in feminist theory and qualitative research methods at the School of Criminal Justice. Her research focuses on gender, crime and victimization in the context of urban communities, the commercial sex industry, and youth gangs. Her dozens of articles and book chapters on these topics have appeared in representative publications such as Criminology, Gender & Society, Theoretical Criminology, and Justice Quarterly.

Miller’s books include Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence (NYU Press, 2008) and One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs, and Gender (Oxford University Press, 2001).  Getting Played was a 2008 finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems and received the 2010 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Race, Gender, and Class Section. Of her many other honors and accolades, in 2009, Miller received the Coramae Richey Mann Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on People of Color and Crime for her outstanding scholarship on race, ethnicity, crime, and justice. 

With a desire to help the Sri Lankan victims of the great tsunami of 2004, Miller helped to establish the Tsunami Reconstruction Project, now known as the Rutgers Sri Lankan Educational Fund. She serves as coordinator of the fund, which provides infrastructural support and educational programming on the Macaldeniya Tea Estate in the central hills of Sri Lanka. To date, the fund’s efforts have helped to build a Montessori school, a library, and a vocational training center.

Before coming to Rutgers University in 2010, Miller taught in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis for 14 years. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Southern California and earned a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in journalism and a master’s degree in sociology from Ohio University. Miller obtained her master’s degree in women’s studies from The Ohio State University.