1. She studies the sociology of culture. Wohl is interested in the intersection of art and sociology, particularly in how people working in creative industries come to decide what ideas are creative. She examines how people evaluate creative products, from visual art to technology, and how they weigh aesthetic, moral, and economic judgments about these products. She is currently working on a book based on an ethnography of the contemporary art world in New York. For this book, she interviewed artists, dealers, curators, collectors and art advisors, asking them detailed questions about how they make creative decisions. “I was trying to figure out how each of these groups decided what was good art—what they wanted to collect and exhibit,” she explained. “For the artists, I was looking at how they make decisions in the creative process and how their participation in the art world affected those decisions.” She hopes the book will be published in the spring of 2021.
2. One particular book inspired her to study sociology. When Wohl was a freshman at Brown University, she read Erving Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.” Though the book was written in 1956, she says that she found Goffman’s theories of social performance relevant to what was happening around her as she and her classmates settled into new lives away from their hometowns. “I think [sociology] was always in line with how I saw the world in some way,” she says. “This view that the social world was something we collectively construct was really interesting to me. It’s something we do throughout our life, but especially as freshmen in undergrad, and it really brought sociology home to me.”
3. In addition to studying art, she also makes it. Wohl was partly inspired to delve into the contemporary art world by her own love of art making. She took classes in painting and figure drawing when she was in college and still enjoys doing both today. She says that she was excited to discover that she could incorporate something she loves into her research: “I had always been really involved with art but didn’t realize I could study it through sociology, so that’s where I brought those two things together.”
4. She is passionate about mentoring graduate students. Since beginning her job at UCSB, Wohl has made it a priority to mentor graduate students in her department. She started a new culture workshop to provide graduate students and faculty with a place to workshop their research and expose them to cutting-edge work happening in this field. She has also put together professional development resources for graduate students, helping them learn about the journal submission process and the job market. “I feel very lucky to be able to have this position here and I want to be able to mentor grad students and put them on the track to get positions at great universities,” Wohl says. “I had really great mentors. If I can pay a small part of that forward, I’ll be happy.”
5. She misses some things about the Northeast, but not winters. Before coming to Santa Barbara, Wohl got her fill of colder climates. She grew up in Massachusetts and then went to college at Brown University in Rhode Island before getting her Ph.D. at Northwestern University. She also did postdoctoral work at Columbia University. “I miss the walkability of New York, the amount of visual stimuli and the level of diversity in terms of culture that’s available. But I do not miss the weather,” she says. “I got enough snow for a lifetime!”
