Center for Rebuilding Sustainable Communities after Disasters

at the University of Massachusetts Boston

Maps & Directions

Faculty & Staff

Ruth Miller, PhD

  • Center for Rebuilding Sustainable Communities after Disasters Associate Professor of History, College of Liberal Arts
  • Telephone: 617.287.6870
  • Office Location: McCormack Hall 4-431

Areas of Expertise

Professor Miller’s research interests include law and jurisprudence, histories of sexuality, and the methodology and theory of history. She teaches courses in these areas as well as in the history, politics, and law of the Ottoman Middle East.

Degrees

PhD, Princeton University

Professional Publications & Contributions

  • 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).
  • Seven Stories of Threatening Speech: Women’s Suffrage Meets Machine Code (University of Michigan Press, under contract).
  • "Genocidal Rights," Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 48 (Fall 2009): 147-175.
  • "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.
  • “The Ottoman and Islamic Substratum of Turkey’s Swiss Civil Code,” Journal of Islamic Studies 11 (3) (September 2000): 335-361.

Additional Information

Ruth Miller joined the History Faculty in 2003 after receiving her BA in History, with a Mathematics minor, from Mount Holyoke College, and her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. She is the author of numerous books, journal articles, and chapters in the fields of law and feminist theory. Her most recent book, Law in Crisis, draws on narratives of earthquakes in Istanbul, San Francisco, and Tokyo to challenge arguments that have posited the rational, bounded self as the normative subject of law—it makes the case that law demands an ecstatic subject and that natural disaster is the endpoint to law. Her current project, Seven Stories of Threatening Speech: Women's Suffrage Meets Machine Code, re-reads the speech surrounding the nineteenth century women's suffrage movement in order to demonstrate the potential methodological benefits of understanding harmful or violent language as a variation on machine code. The book, under contract with the University of Michigan Press, tells a familiar tale of the threats posed by speech, but from an unfamiliar vantage point of information theory, computation, and code.