Ph.D. Yale University, American Studies, 1985
Professor of Art History and Archaeology

Professor Miller's teaching and research interests are the cultural history of 19th and 20th century American arts. More specialized areas of research and teaching include 19th/20th century visual culture (histories of panoramas, animation, cartoons, photography and graphic design); gender and sexuality in the Gilded Age and fin-de-siècle; visual constructions of nationhood; the Atlantic world during the period of first European encounters; early American modernism, and the cultural histories of arts between the two world wars.

Publications:
—Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875, published by Cornell University Press in 1993, was the winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association (1994) and the Charles Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian (1995).
—American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (Prentice-Hall, October 2007). Led team of six scholars in comprehensive synthetic new history of the arts from a millennium before contact with Europe up to the present.

Recent work (selective):
—"Beyond the National Self: Cross-Cultural Exchange and Postcolonial Studies." In Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch Der Guernica-Gessellschaft, Special edition on commissioned essay for catalogue on Zoe Leonard; "You See That I Am Here After All," (forthcoming): Dia/Beacon, New York.
—"The Twentieth Century Artistic Reception of Whitman and Melville." In Michael Robertson and David Blake, eds. Walt Whitman:Where the Future Becomes Present (University of Iowa Press,2008).
—Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture in the 1930s and 1940s (2006).
—“Chasing the Phantom: Cultural Memory in the Image of the West.” In Redrawing the Boundaries: Perspectives on Western American Art (Denver Art Museum in association with the University of Washington Press, 2007).
—“The Image of Nature in American Landscape Art: The Dilemmas of ‘Nature’s Nation’ and the Art of Landscape,” in Michael Lewis, ed., American Wilderness (Oxford University Press, 2007).
—"With Eyes Wide Open’: The Americanization of Surrealism,” in Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick, eds., Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture in the 1930s and 1940s. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).
—“Death and Resurrection in an Artist’s Studio.” American Art  20, no. 1 (Spring 2006).

Published articles and review essays in American Art, Oxford Art Journal, Art in America, American Quarterly, New England Quarterly, Winterthur Portfolio, Prospects, and American Literary History. Work in recent and forthcoming anthologies of essays on American art and culture: American Wilderness (forthcoming); A Keener Perception (forthcoming); Critical Issues in American Art (1998); The Material Culture of Gender (1997); American Iconology (1993); and Michael Lewis, ed., American Wilderness (2007).


Honors and awards:
—Outstanding Mentor Award, Graduate Student Senate, Washington University, Spring 2009.
— Special Recognition for Mentoring Award, Graduate School Senate, Washington University, May 2006.
— Andrew Mellon Foundation, Grant-in-Aid to assist in development of ArtStor, a digital archive of Art History and visual culture, 2001-03.
— Senior Scholar, Summer Residency Program, Musée d’Art Americain (Terra Foundation), Giverny, France. July 2002.

Recent conference papers:
— “Writing Across Borders: American Arts after Multiculturalism.” John F. Kennedy Institute for American Studies, Berlin, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. May 2007.
— “Curating Art in a Transnational Context,” University of Hamburg and the Bucerius Kunst Forum, May 23, 2007.
— “Our America?” Questions and Proposals for the 21st Century.” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April 2007.
— “Cultural Memory in the Image of the West.” Denver Art Museum, March 2007.
— “Romantic Landscape Painting and the Idea of American Exceptionalism.” Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City, February 2007.
— “Archipenko’s “Torso in Space”: The Machine Stripped Bare.” Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts. November 2006.
— “The Global Turn in American Art.” Smithsonian American Art Museum,” September 2006.
“On Translating Global Culture(s).” For “Translating Global Cultures: Toward Interdisciplinary (Re) Constructions”  Beijing, August 2006.

In recent years, I have undertaken advising in the area of Latin American arts, a field of developing interest.

Recent service in American Studies and Art History:
Chair, John Hope Franklin Prize Committee for best book in American
Studies. American Studies Association, 2004.
Consultant, Andrew Mellon Foundation, to assist in development of ArtStor,
a digital archive of Art History and visual culture.
Senior Scholar, Musee D’Art Americain (Terra Foundation), Giverny, France.
July 2002.
Editorial Board, American Quarterly. Two three-year terms (1996-2001).

Courses include:
History of American Pohotography
Theory for Art History (co-taught)
The American Trauma (co-taught: on Civil War and American memory)
Fin-de-siécle United States
Art and cultural criticism of the 1920s
Culture and politics in the 1930s
The arts of cultural encounter in the American West
Gender and American art: images and issues
American modernisms
Art and culture in the Gilded Age
American art to 1900
American art, 1900-1950
The city in American arts and popular culture, 1910-1940

Recent and ongoing M.A./ Ph.D. titles:
“Binding Frankenstein : Reclaiming the Self in the Visual Culture of the Machine Age” (Ph.D.)
“White Collared: Fashioning Masculinity in American Visual Culture” (Ph.D.)
“Modern Eremites: Art and the Vocation of Withdrawal in Gilded Age America.” (Ph.D.)
“Action as Reaction: The New York School and the Formulation of an American Avant-Garde.” (M.A.)
“The Iconographic Tradition of the Calavera: Nationalism and International Modernism in the Representation of Mexican Folk Culture.” (M.A.)

Professor Miller can be contacted at almiller@artsci.wustl.edu