“Howard/Harvard: ‘Our Kind of People’ and Black Ivy Style”

Monica L. Miller, associate professor of English, joined the faculty of Barnard in 2001. In addition to her teaching duties in the department of English, she is affiliated with the Africana studies, the American studies, and the film studies programs at Barnard.

Professor Miller specializes in African-American and American literature and cultural studies. Her research interests include twentieth- and -twenty-first-century African-American literature, film, and contemporary art; contemporary literature and cultural studies of the black diaspora (especially black Britain); performance studies; and intersectional studies of race, gender, and sexuality.

Her teaching at Barnard includes a senior seminars on contemporary African American literature; black stereotypes and performances of race; Toni Morrison; a seminar on black masculinity in literature and visual culture; and lecture classes on the Harlem Renaissance and contemporary American literature.  In 2008, she was awarded the Gladys Brooks Junior Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award.

Her book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, was published by Duke University Press in 2009.  It has received the 2010 William Sanders Scarborough Prize for the best book in African American literature and culture from the Modern Language Association; it was shortlisted for the 2010 Modernist Studies Association book prize. 

She is currently at work on a new project entitled Affirmative Actions: Ways to Define Black Culture in the 21st Century, which examines very contemporary black literature and culture from five vantage points (the novel, contemporary art, documentary film, museums/archives, and politics) in order to assess the consequences of thinking of black identity as “post-black” or “post-racial.”

Professor Miller is the recipient of grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Academic Focus:

African-American literature
and cultural studies
Black diaspora
Race, gender, sexuality

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