Faculty biography - David Miller
David C. Miller is Professor of English at Allegheny College, where he teaches American literature, literary and cultural theory and such interdisciplinary courses as “Re-gendering Culture, Engendering Modernism,” “The Civil War in American Culture and Imagination,” and “Modernist American Literature and European Painting.”
He has published in American literature and art, including Dark Eden: The Swamp in 19th Century American Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1989), while editing American Iconology: New Approaches to Art and Literature (Yale University Press, 1993). He is currently completing a book-length study tentatively entitled, “Beyond the Sister Arts Idea: Visual-Verbal Interaction in 19th Century New England.”
Professor Miller grew up in California but his earliest memories are of the Midwest. His longstanding aspiration to teach an interdisciplinary course on Chicago doubtless has something to do with visits to that city as a tiny boy, including many happy hours spent in the Art Institute and the museums of Science and Industry and Natural History. One of his favorite things to do was to go with his dad to Halsted Street, a locale he remembers as thronged with all kinds of people, to get a delicious Polish sausage from a street vendor. Recent visits to Chicago with his family have revived his interest in Chicago’s many fascinating neighborhoods.
Professor Miller’s longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary education began with an undergraduate major in American studies at Stanford and was fostered by graduate work in American Civilization at Brown. It further developed during two years teaching in the History and Literature Program at Harvard and a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in English at Stanford. Since arriving at Allegheny in 1985, Professor Miller has been actively involved in numerous interdisciplinary initiatives, including the development of a course on the arts and embodiment, required of all freshmen, and faculty summer seminars on subjects ranging from race and ethnicity to science and the humanities, energy in its various guises, and the concept of “whiteness.” He himself organized such seminars on Northwest Pennsylvania regional studies, American studies, science and the transformation of American life, and, most recently, neuroscience and integrative thinking. Professor Miller has been active in the small town of Meadville, where Allegheny is located, serving on the city’s Beautification Committee as well as on the local school board. He has traveled throughout the world, lived extensively in Europe and regularly leads Allegheny students on historically grounded tours of Italy.