CJ Pascoe is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colorado College. In the summer of 2013 she will be joining the sociology faculty at the University of Oregon.   She teaches courses on sexuality, social psychology, deviance, gender and education.  Her current research focuses on gender, youth, homophobia, sexuality and new media. 

Her book, Dude, You’re  a Fag:  Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, won the American Educational Research Association’s 2007 Book of the Year Award.  Dude documents the relationship between homophobic harassment, heterosexism and masculinity in high school.  In it she suggests ways we might begin to redefine gender norms that are damaging to both boys and girls. 

Before coming to Colorado College, CJ spent two years working with the Digital Youth Project, part of the MacArthur Foundation’s initiative in learning and new media.  Along with her co-researchers and under the guidance of Mimi Ito, CJ co-authored Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out:  Living and Learning with New Media, the largest qualitative study of youth new media use to date. 

CJ’s research has been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Toronto Globe and Mail, American Sexuality Magazine and Inside Higher Ed.  She has appeared in the Frontline documentary Growing Up Online as well as on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

With Professor Natalie Boero she is currently publishing a series of articles on online interaction in pro-anorexia discussion groups.  The first of these,  “Pro-Anorexia Communities and Online Interaction: Bringing the Pro-Ana Body Online,” was recently published in the journal Body and Society.

She received her B.A. in Sociology from Brandeis University in 1996 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006.