Meet Professor Miller
Channon S. Miller, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of San Diego, specializing in African American History. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University in 2017 where she was a Whitney M. Young, Jr. Fellow. Miller’s work concerns itself with cultivating an archive of Black mothers’ marginalization and resistance in America at the turn of the 21st century. Miller is from Hartford, Connecticut; the city, and her community’s lives and activism for Black people and freedom since the years of the Great Migration, grounds and inspires her writings and research.
Has Your Student Taken a Black Studies Class? Encouraging Family Conversations About Race Professor Miller, would you tell us about yourself and about your faculty position at University of San Diego? I joined the University’s Department of History as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the fall of 2017, and as a tenure-track, Assistant Professor in Spring 2019. I am one of the department’s Americanist Historians. I am the specialist in African American History and develop and introduce courses and curriculum that center and elevate our student body’s exposure to Black American life, history and culture. Coupled with this, I am also a historian of women’s distant and recent pasts in the United States, offering courses that seat race and gender at the same table, and unpack the ways in which race converges with gender to shape women’s lives. For example, my entry level course, American Women in History, gives particular attention to women of color. I am originally from Hartford, Connecticut, where I attended Trinity College for my undergraduate degree. It was there that my passion for studying and writing about the Black experience was nurtured, and where I ultimately decided that I wanted it to be my life’s work. A vital part of protecting and covering Black lives in America is to ensure that their — our — stories are told, recorded, documented and archived. It illuminates truths and voices that would otherwise be left untold, muted or distorted.
What’s your favorite thing about teaching college students?
Channon S. Miller, Ph.D. We communicated with Professor Channon S. Miller of the University of San Diego in December 2020. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
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My favorite thing about teaching college students is the ability to positively transform and shift the way they not only see the world but also navigate it. How I see it, by way of my teachings, guidance and mentorship, I am not only ensuring that they make it to graduation, but that they become people who are conscious of power, race, gender and class — the systems that ground oppression and the invisibility of the oppressed — and are in a position to interrogate and question these practices in their day-to-day lives.
Spring 2021
