Jay David Miller, PhD

Jay David Miller is an assistant professor of English and an associate director of the George Fox University Honors Program. His broad fields of research encompass the literatures of colonial North America and the Atlantic world, the early American republic, and the antebellum United States.

His first book, The Quaker Jeremiad, is forthcoming with The Pennsylvania State University Press. The Quaker Jeremiad is a literary history of neglected genre of agrarian writing produced by Quakers from the English civil wars through the aftermath of the American Revolution. This genre offers a crucial alternative to Jeffersonian agrarianism in early America, making an important and influential rapprochement between agrarian thought and environmental justice. 

Miller also coedited a recent special issue of Early American Literature, "New Directions in Quaker Literary History," and is the editor of the journal Quaker Religious Thought. His research has been supported by the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, and his articles have appeared in Early American Literature, Religion and Literature, Quaker Studies, and The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. He is the author of the entry on John Woolman in Oxford Bibliographies Online: American Literature. 

Prior to coming to George Fox, Miller was the 2021 ACLS Carl and Betty Pforzheimer Fellow in English and American Literature and a research associate at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation received the McNeil Center's 2021 Zuckerman Prize in American Studies for connecting American history with literature.

An experienced teacher of literature and writing, at George Fox Miller moderates seminars on great texts in the honors program and teaches a variety of courses in the Department of English, such as American literature to 1865 and Native American literature. He also teaches a special topics course titled "The Quaker Way: History, Theology, Practice."

Education

PhD, University of Notre Dame
MA, The Pennsylvania State University
BA, George Fox University