Associate Professor of Jewish Studies
Associate Professor of French and Latin American Studies
Ph.D. Emory University, Comparative Literature
M.A. University of Maryland College Park, Comparative Literature
After more than a decade as a Spanish professor, Professor Miller was delighted to join the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt in the Fall of 2010. His PhD was in Comparative Literature and he is committed to comparative approaches to the literatures, languages, music and cultures of the Francophone, Hispanic and Anglophone Caribbean. His book, Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination, was published in May, 2010 by the University of Virginia Press. In it, he discusses the legacy and re-evaluation of the impact of the Enlightenment in the Caribbean as reflected in six modern Caribbean authors from across linguistic and national boundaries.
In addition to French and Latin American literature courses Professor Miller also introduced into the curriculum at Vanderbilt a course on Latin American and Caribbean Jewish writers that I have taught in Spanish and English. He has an ongoing book project on this topic entitled “The Dialectics of Tradition and Assimilation in Latin American and Caribbean Jewish Writing.” Additionally, Professor Miller works extensively on Latin American Jewish literature and has published several articles on this topic.
In addition to his teaching and scholarship Professor Miller has enjoyed leading study abroad groups to Aix-en-Provence as the Professeur-en-Residence of Vanderbilt-in-France; Madrid as the Director of the Vanderbilt-in-Spain, to Cuba in a Vanderbilt “Maymester” and on several trips to Cuernavaca, México.
In his spare time he enjoys playing basketball with students and faculty at the Rec Center, tennis at the Currey Tennis Center, and playing jazz, classical, flamenco and rock and roll guitar.