Nancy K. Miller

Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY.  Her current project is a memoir whose working title is I Found My Family in a Drawer: A Jewish American Scrapbook (forthcoming, University of Nebraska).  The memoir tells the story of reconstructing a lost immigrant family history from a minuscule archive of ephemera and objects, uncollected photographs, and previously untranslated correspondences. 

Ms. Miller’s career began in the French department a Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D., changed direction when she became the director of the Women’s Studies Program at Barnard College, and changed once again in the late 1980s when she joined the faculty of the City University.  Her books follow a similar trajectory of change from studies of the French and English eighteenth-century novel, to theories of French women’s writing, to experiments with feminist autobiography and personal cirticism.  Her most recent books are But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives (Columbia UP, 2002), and a co-edited anthology, Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community (Indiana UP, 2002).