Title: Associate Professor
Department: English
Research Fields of Interest: Victorian Literature, Animal Studies, Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities
Degrees: A.B., Duke University; M.A., Ph.D., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Contact Info:
Email: jmiller2@allegheny.edu
Phone: (814) 332-4331
Office Location: Odd Fellows 234
Office Hours (Spring ’24): Tuesdays 1:00-2:00pm; Wednesdays 10:00am-12:00pm & 2:00-4:00pm; Thursdays 9:30-10:30am
Book an appointment here.
Courses (Spring ’24)
ENGL 114 – Literature and Business
ENGL 117 – Literature and Science
ENGL 230 – British Literatures
Publications:
Scholarly Articles
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(Co-authored with Lauren Fugate) “Shakespeare’s Starlings: Literary History and the Fictions of Invasiveness.” Environmental Humanities vol. 13, no. 2, 2021, pp. 301-322.
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“Weird Beyond Description: Weird Fiction and the Suspicion of Scenery.” Victorian Studies vol. 62, no. 2, 2020, pp. 244-252.
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“Mischaracterizing the Environment: Hardy, Darwin, and the Art of Ecological Storytelling.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language vol. 62, no. 2, 2020, pp. 149-177.
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“The Ecological Plot: A Brief History of Multispecies Storytelling, from Malthus to Middlemarch.” Victorian Literature and Culture vol. 48, no. 1, 2020, pp. 155-185.
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“Composing Decomposition: In Memoriam and the Ecocritical Undertaking.” Nineteenth-
Century Contexts vol. 39, no. 5, 2017, pp. 383-398. - “When Drama Went to the Dogs; or, Staging Otherness in the Animal Melodrama.” PMLA vol. 132, no. 3, 2017, pp. 526-542.
- “Slavish Poses: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Aesthetics of Abolition.” Victorian Poetry vol. 52, no. 4, 2014, pp. 637-659.
Essays on Books and Popular Culture
- “What Birders Don’t See.” Public Books, 10 Nov. 2020.
- “Animal Attraction: The Ridiculous Realism of Bachelor in Paradise.” Avidly, 4 Oct. 2018.
- “Meat Cultures.” [Review of Carol J. Adams, Burger and Ted Geier, Meat Markets: The Cultural History of Bloody London.] Humanimalia vol. 10, no. 1, 2018.
- “Can Novels Change our Attitudes About Death?” Electric Literature, 27 Feb. 2018.
- “Is it Really so Wrong to Kill a Mockingbird?” The Millions, 21 July 2016.
- “People Are Sickening: The Bug’s Eye View of Pandemic Games.” PopMatters, 5 Feb. 2013.
Creative Writing
- “A Technique for Recording” (poetry), The Shore 14 (Summer 2022)
- “Taxis and Instinct” (poetry), The Shore 14 (Summer 2022)
- “Columbarium” (poetry), Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment (Winter 2021/22)
- “Blissful Creatures” (fiction), About Place Journal 6. no. 4 (October 2021)
Selected Conference Presentations
- “The Unnatural History of Egdon Heath: Ecology and Agency in Hardy’s Wessex.” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, Asheville, North Carolina. (March 2016).
- “Mutes, Brutes, and the Industrial Novel.” North American Victorian Studies Association, Pasadena, California. (October 2013)
- “Character or Setting?: Animals and Environments in George Eliot’s Realism.” Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, Lawrence, Kansas. (June 2013)
- “Humanizing the Social Network in George Eliot and G. H. Lewes.” North American Victorian Studies Association, Madison, Wisconsin. (September 2012)
- “Out of Hand: Visuality, Writing, and the Detection of Authorship in Bleak House.” The Dickens Project, Santa Cruz, California. (July 2012)