dr. LE (Laura) Braden

Biography

Laura Braden (L.E.A. Braden) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research examines how cultural organizations, museums, and artistic careers shape recognition and inequality in the contemporary art world. She focuses particularly on gender, institutional prestige, and the organizational mechanisms that determine which artists and artworks gain visibility.

Braden’s current NWO Open Competition project, Deal at the Crossroads: Navigating Challenges in Shifting Legal and Cultural Landscapes, investigates how museums in Rotterdam, Austin, and Manchester develop and implement diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives amid rapidly changing political and legal environments. The project combines quantitative analysis, social network analysis, policy comparison, and multi-sited qualitative fieldwork to understand how institutions respond to pressure from the public, policymakers, and their own communities.

Her earlier NWO Veni project, Boundaries by Design: How Dutch and American Designers Navigate Multiple Fields, explored how designers build careers across art, commerce, and technology, and how artistic legitimacy is negotiated across overlapping professional worlds.

Methodologically, Braden works across quantitative, mixed-methods, and social network analysis traditions. She develops and analyzes large archival datasets, conducts fieldwork inside cultural organizations, and uses symbolic association networks to study how prestige circulates through programming decisions, museum exhibitions, and award systems. Her ongoing work includes projects on gender in orchestral programming, historic networks of major European museums, and valuation dynamics in contemporary art.

Her publications appear in leading journals including Social Networks, Social Forces, American Behavioral Scientist, Poetics, Journal of Chinese Sociology, and Gender, Work & Organization. She collaborates internationally with researchers in the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia, and her work regularly informs discussions in museum policy, cultural planning, and public debates on representation in the arts.

Braden teaches sociological theory and cultural policy at the graduate level, alongside courses in cultural sociology and social networks. She supervises BA, MA, and PhD research on museums, art organizations, gender in the arts, and valuation processes, with a strong emphasis on connecting academic research to societal impact.

Across her projects, Braden is committed to producing research that is both theoretically rigorous and publicly relevant—bridging scholarly conversations and contemporary debates about equity, artistic value, and the future of cultural institutions.