Jay David Miller, PhD
Assistant Professor of English
Associate Director, Honors Program
Teaching and Research Interests
- Early American literature
- The Atlantic World
- Theology and literature
- Literature and the environment
- Quakerism
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.
Prior to coming to George Fox, he 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 first book, Quaker Jeremiad, is under contract with The Pennsylvania State University Press. Based on his dissertation, which received the McNeil Center's 2021 Zuckerman Prize in American Studies, Quaker Jeremiad is a study of a 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 is a coeditor of a forthcoming special issue of Early American Literature, "New Directions in Quaker Literary History," and 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 Religion and Literature, Early American 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.
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, Languages, and Communication, such as American literature to 1865 and Native American literature. In the spring of 2026, he is offering a special course titled "The Quaker Way: History, Theology, Practice."
Education
PhD,
BA, George Fox University