Marilyn Miller

Marilyn Miller’s scholarly work explores Caribbean, Latin American and inter-American topics from the comparative vantage points of literary, historical, and cultural studies. With a joint appointment in the departments of Spanish and Portuguese and Jewish Studies, her research explores topics such as migration, diaspora, slavery, race, and mestizaje as represented in literature, visual culture, and musics of the Americas. She has received several research fellowships including a Fulbright (Argentina), the Pinkas Fellowship at the University of Florida, and a Fordham Judaic Studies/New York Public Library semester fellowship. Professor Miller has participated as well in the Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the NEH Summer Institute “José Martí and the Florida Immigrant Communities” the Oxford-ISGAP Summer Institute for Curriculum Development in Critical Contemporary Antisemitism Studies, and the faculty seminar “After Evil: the Ethical Dynamics of Addressing the Past,” also at the USHMM.

Miller’s acclaimed first monograph, Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2004), deals with unique manifestations and representations of mestizo cultures in different sites in the Caribbean and continental Latin America from the colonial period to the present. She edited the collection of interdisciplinary essays Tango Lessons: Movement, Sound, Image, and Text in Contemporary Practice (Duke University Press, 2014), which included her own exploration of the representation of tango in art and popular culture. Professor Miller is also the author of Eduardo Halfon and the Itinerary of Memory (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024) and a book in progress titled José Martí, the Man and the Mensch: How Jews and their Allies Helped Build Cuba Libre. Additionally, she has published widely on Caribbean cultural and literary phenomena, including several essays on the 19th century poet Juan Francisco Manzano and the relationship between poetry and emancipation in the works of other Afro descendent writers in the US and Cuba. At Tulane, she formed the Jewish Caribbean (JEW-C) Working Group which brings together an international cohort of scholars researching Jewish topics in the context of the French, Spanish, English, and Dutch Caribbean.