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Faculty & Staff

Areas of Expertise

Professor Miller’s primary area of expertise is the history of gender and sexuality, with particular reference to the Ottoman Empire and west Asia. Her research and teaching interests also include legal theory, the history and theory of computation, and historical methodology.

Degrees

PhD (Near Eastern Studies) Princeton University
MA (Near Eastern Studies) Princeton University
BA (History, with Mathematics minor) Mount Holyoke College

Professional Publications & Contributions

• Books
• Seven Stories of Threatening Speech: Women's Suffrage Meets Machine Code (University of Michigan Press, 2011; paperback edition expected January 2013).
• Law in Crisis: The Ecstatic Subject of Natural Disaster (Stanford University Press, 2009).
• The Erotics of Corruption: Law, Scandal, and Political Perversion (SUNY Press, 2008; paperback edition, 2009).
• The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective (Ashgate, 2007).
• Legislating Authority: Sin and Crime in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey (Routledge, 2005; Turkish edition by Yaran Yayıncılık expected November 2013).
• Snarl: In Defense of Stalled Traffic and Faulty Networks (University of Michigan Press, under contract).
• Book Chapters
• “Therapeutic Death,” in Austin Sarat, Karl Shoemaker, eds. Who Deserves to Die?: Constructing the Executable Subject (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).
• “Violence Without Agency,” in Austin Sarat, Carleen R. Basler, and Thomas Dumm, eds. Performances of Violence (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).
• “Religious v. Ethnic Identity in Fourteenth-Century Bithynia: Gregory Palamas and the Case of the Chionai,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 13 (1-2) (2007): 27-42. (Turkish translation: “14. Yüzyılda Bitinya’da Dinî ve Etnik Kimlik: Gregory Palamas ve Chionai Örneği,” Baki Tezcan ve Karl K. Barbir, Osmanlı Dünyasında Kimlik ve Kimlik Oluşumu. İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2012.)
• “Sin, Scandal, and Disaster: Politics and Crime in Contemporary Turkey,” in John T. Parry, ed. Evil, Law and the State: Perspectives on State Power and Violence (Rodopi Press, 2006).
• Journal Articles
• "Genocidal Rights," Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 48 (Fall 2009): 147-175.
• “Cruel and Uncaring Doctors,” Law and Literature 21 (3) (Fall 2009): 371-386.
• "Rights, Reproduction, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32 (2) (Winter 2007): 347-375.
• “On Freedom and Feeding Tubes: Reviving Terri Schiavo and Trying Saddam Hussein,” Law and Literature 19 (2) (2007): 161-186.
• “Politicizing Reproduction in Comparative Perspective: Ottoman, Turkish, and French Approaches to Abortion Law,” Hawwa: Journal of Women in the Middle East and the Islamic World 5 (1) (2007): 73-89.
• “The Missionary Narrative as Coercive Interrogation: Seduction, Confession, and Self Presentation in Women's ‘Letters Home,’” Women’s History Review 15 (5) (November 2006): 751-771.
• “Apostates and Bandits: Religious and Secular Interaction in the Administration of Ottoman Criminal Law,” Studia Islamica 97 (2003): 155-179.
• “Violence, Corruption and Neo-Imperialism: The Centrality of Islamic Law in the Turkish Political Discourse,” Turkish Studies Association Journal 27 (1) (Spring 2003): 53-68.
• “The Ottoman and Islamic Substratum of Turkey’s Swiss Civil Code,” Journal of Islamic Studies 11 (3) (September 2000): 335-361.

Additional Information

Spring 2013 Office Hours: MW (12 noon-1 p.m.)

Ruth Miller joined the History faculty at UMass Boston in 2003 after receiving a BA in History (with a Mathematics minor) from Mount Holyoke College and a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. In 2009 she also became a faculty affiliate with the Center for Rebuilding Sustainable Communities after Disasters at UMass Boston’s McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies. She has taught courses and published in the fields of Ottoman and Turkish history, law and jurisprudence, and feminist theory.

Professor Miller's CV