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Erika Lorraine Milam is an historian of science whose research investigates the construction and maintenance of boundaries between human and animal in research on evolutionary theory, animal behavior, and anthropology.

Milam is the author of Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). In her book, she examines the history of female mate choice from late-nineteenth century debates over sexual selection to discussions over female choice as part of sociobiology in the 1970s and 80s (including population genetics, ethology, and comparative psychology). Milam argues that research on female reproductive behavior was not eclipsed during these decades, and that therefore the lack of interest in sexual selection should be attributed to concerns of biologists over the capacity of animals to “choose” rather than inattention to females within evolutionary biology. Additionally, she suggests that histories of sexual selection written in the 1980s served to demarcate disciplinary identities in the 20th-century life sciences and to bolster the scientific and popular prestige of the “field” as an obligatory place for accessing truths about nature.