Background

Christopher Miller was born on September 15, 1953.

Education

Christopher Miller earned a Bachelor of Arts at Boston University in 1975 and a Doctor of Philosophy at Yale University in 1983. He also studied at L'École Normale Supérieure in France in 1981-1982.

Career

Christopher Miller served for two years with the Peace Corps in Zaire, where he was an instructor of English at the Institut Bondoyi in Muene Ditu. Then, in 1983 he started to work at Yale University. Miller held the position of an assistant professor in 1983-1987, a Charles B. G. Murphy Associate Professor of French and Afro-American Studies in 1987-1990, and professor in 1990-1999. To date, he is a chair of the French department since 1997 and a Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of French and African American Studies since 1999.

Besides, Christopher Miller is a writer. In addition to writing books, he is a contributor to scholarly articles to journals and books, including The Encyclopedia of Sub-Saharan Africa, A New History of French Literature, and Literary Theory and African Literature. Miller is the author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa, and, more recently, Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. Nationalists and Nomads is a collection of six essays, four of which originated as articles Miller wrote for various journals. These essays cover the history of Francophone African literature, which Miller argues began with the publication of Senegalese author Ahmadou Mapate Diagne's book Les trois volontes de Malic in 1920. In the second and third essays, Miller discusses the relationship between France and its African colonies in the 1930s as reflected in the International Colonial Exposition held in 1931 and in a novel, Mirages de Paris, which was set at that exposition. The fourth essay covers the impact of the emerging nationalist movements in Africa had upon the region's literature.

In his another book, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity, Miller asserts that unless you are Charles Dickens reading George Eliot (whom Dickens did famously discern was a woman hiding behind a male pen name), even the most expert literary critics are fooled in a well literary hoax, even if, after the reveal, many claims to have known the truth all along. He set out to find out and demonstrate that there is this long tradition of literary hoaxing in France, which is not the same as the rich American tradition.

Achievements

• Christopher Miller is widely known as a writer and educator. He teaches at Yale University for almost forty years. Miller has received several fellowships for his research, including work in France and Africa. Among these are the Morse Fellowship in the Humanities, Fulbright Africa Research Fellowship, a Yale Senior Faculty Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and Guggenheim fellowship, both in 2003-2004.

Works

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  • Nationalists and Nomads

    (How does African literature written in French change the ...)

    1998
  • The French Atlantic Triangle

    (This magisterial work is the first comprehensive examinat...)

    2008
  • Blank Darkness

    (Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French is an anal...)

    1985
  • Prophetic Worlds

    (In his provocative ethnohistory, Christopher Miller offer...)

    1985
  • Blue and Gray on the Border

    (This resource-packed book will aid heritage travelers, st...)

    2018
  • Impostors

    (This book looks at authors who posed as people they were ...)

    2018
  • Theories of Africans 1990
  • Making America 2013

Views

Quotations: "It never ceases to amaze me how - when you’re looking at a single sentence and sometimes even a single word - it can change back and forth before your eyes depending on who you think the author is."

Membership

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  Christopher Miller is a member of the review committee of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  National Endowment for the Humanities , United States