Elizabeth Miller

• 133 - 19th-Century British Literature

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is Professor of English and Interim Chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She joined the UC Davis English department in 2008 and served as Chair of English from 2013-2016. Before coming to Davis, she taught at Ohio University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oklahoma. Her scholarly interests include nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature of Britain and the British Empire, ecocriticism and environmental studies, gender studies, and media studies. Her latest book titled Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion appeared with Princeton University Press in October 2021. Previous books include Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford University Press, 2013), and Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle (University of Michigan Press, 2008). In 2018, she guest-edited a special issue of Victorian Studies on "Climate Change and Victorian Studies" and in 2019 she published a co-edited volume titled Teaching William Morris. She also edited the first fully-annotated collection of George Bernard Shaw's political writings (Oxford, 2021).

Selected Awards

• Awarded the 2022 Stansky Book Prize for Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (2021).
• Awarded Honorable Mention for the 2022 ASLE Ecocriticism Book Award for Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (2021).
• Extraction Ecologies named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year.
• Richard Stein Essay Prize awarded to "Drill Baby Drill: Extraction Ecologies, Open Temporalities, and Reproductive Futurity in the Provincial Realist Novel" (2020). Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Association (2022)
• Guggenheim Fellowship (2019)
• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship (January - December 2019)
• Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall, Cambridge University, March - August 2017.
• Best Book of the Year, awarded to Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (2013) by the North American Victorian Studies Association.
• Honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, for Slow Print (2013).
• Chancellor's Fellow, University of California, Davis, 2013-2014
• Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), 2009-2010
• Curran Fellowship, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, 2008
• Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship, William Morris Society in the United States, 2007
• Public Goods Council Mellon Junior Fellowship, University of Michigan, 2004-2006

Publication Spotlight:

Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion. Princeton University Press, Fall 2021.

Co-Winner, 2022 Stansky Book Prize, North American Conference on British Studies.

Honorable Mention for the 2022 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Ecocriticism Book Award.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

Subject of a special Review Forum in Victorian Studies 64.3

"Elizabeth Carolyn Miller's much-anticipated Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion is a rich and moving contribution to the rapidly evolving field of the energy humanities. ... Her book will become essential reading for scholars of the very long nineteenth century and an invaluable resource for those seeking new ways to teach that literature to students whose lives are taking shape in the inescapable context of accelerating climate change." -- Review by Iain Crawford, Dickens Quarterly (June 2022)

"This is a major book that will invite scholars of the period to think in new ways about 'extractivism,' while also showing how vital historical interpretation is to the environmental and energy humanities, fields that have predominantly focused on contemporary culture." -- Review by Benjamin Morgan, Critical Inquiry (2023)

George Bernard Shaw, Major Political Writings. Ed. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller. Oxford University Press, 2021. 

Teaching William Morris. Eds. Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2019.

 

 "We so rarely talk about the nuts and bolts of teaching and our wildest hopes and dreams when teaching what we love; this collection does that." -- Review by Carolyn Lesjak, Victorian Studies (Spring 2022).

 

Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture.
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.

by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

Winner of Best Book of the Year for 2013, North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)

Honorable Mention for the 2014 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize

"Slow Print builds carefully on several generations of scholarship in the field—but pushes the scholarly conversation forward in important and new directions through its archival findings and synthetic analysis. This is a sit-up-and-take-notice, must-read book in Victorian and modernist studies."—Ann Ardis, University of Delaware

 "Miller's own reading, while careful, must have been anything but slow: she commands a dauntingly deep reservoir of sources, and her argument overflows with incisive analyses." -- Review by Leah Price, Times Literary Supplement (24 May 2013)

"Slow print is a brilliant phrase on Miller’s part, drawing together as it does not only a new sense of urgency in response to accelerated capitalist production at the end of the nineteenth century but also our own period’s response to the heightened acceleration wrought by new digital technologies.... In a single term Miller collapses two periods and helps us to understand both better." -- Review by Barbara Leckie, Victorian Literature and Culture (August 2015)

Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.

by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

"remarkable for its wide-ranging scholarship and the breadth of its author’s thinking. Miller has produced a valuable, highly readable study that will change the way we think about the New Woman and her political and social agency." -- Review by Grace Moore, Nineteenth Century Literature (December 2009): 426-29.

"Framed is a book that is remarkable for its steady erudition, its calm authority, and its consistent maintenance of a very high standard indeed for itself. There is not a wasted word or a subpar argument. This is a meticulous and intelligent treatment of what makes modernity." -- Review by Talia Schaffer, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (November 2009).

Selected Publications:

Books:

• Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, October 2021.
• Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
• Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, November 2008.

Edited volumes:

• Guest-edited special issue of Victorian Studies on the topic "Climate Change and Victorian Studies." 60.4 (Summer 2018).
• Teaching William Morris. Co-editor with Jason Martinek. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2019.
• George Bernard Shaw, Major Political Writings. Oxford World Classics, January 2021.
• Guest-edited special issue of Victorian Network on the topic "Victorian Ecologies." Vol. 10 (Winter 2021).

Selected Articles:

• "'The Stepping Stones of Empire': Conrad, Coal, and Oceanic Infrastructure." Forthcoming in special "Infrastructure" issue of Victorian Literature and Culture. Co-written with George Hegarty. Expected release 2024. 27 t.s. pp.
• "Fossil Fuels and the Fiction of Extraction." Forthcoming in Commodities and Literature. Eds. Sudesh Mishra and Caitlin Vandertop. Cambridge University Press. Expected release 2023. 20 t.s. pp.
• "Landscape and Environment." Forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to William Morris. Ed. Marcus Waithe. Cambridge University Press. Expected release 2023. 15 t.s. pp.
• "Extraction, Exhaustion, and the Sensation Novel of the 1860s." Forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s. Ed. Pamela Gilbert. Cambridge University Press. Expected release 2023. 22 t.s. pp.
• "Expandability and Expendability: Reading the Sacrifice Zone." Afterword to "Sacrifice Zones," a special issue of Textual Practice 37.10 (2023): 1624-1630.
• "Extraction." Special keywords issue of Victorian Literature and Culture 51.3 (2023): 403-6.
• "'Only Nature Is a Thing Unreal': The Anthropocene 1890s." Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s. Eds. Dustin Friedman and Kristin Mahoney. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 170-86.
• "B Side: George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy." Public Books. 22 June 2023.
• "Response." Review Forum on Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion. Victorian Studies 64.3 (Spring 2022): 450-58.
• “Drill Baby Drill: Extraction Ecologies, Open Temporalities, and Reproductive Futurity in the Provincial Realist Novel.” Victorian Literature and Culture 48.1, special issue on “Open Ecologies” (2020): 29-56.
  • Winner: Richard Stein Essay Prize for 2020, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Association.
• “William Morris and the Literature and Socialism of the Commonweal.” Routledge Companion to William Morris. Ed. Florence Boos. London: Routledge, 2020. 422-41.
• “A Column of Our Own: Women's Columns in Socialist Newspapers.” In Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s­-1920s: the Modernist Period. Eds. Carey Snyder and Faith Binckes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019. 405-20.
• “Class and Social Status.” In A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Empire, 1800-1920. Ed. Sarah Heaton. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2019. 139-55.
• “Fixed Capital and the Flow: Water Power, Steam Power, and The Mill on the Floss.” Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. Eds. Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer. Fordham UP, 2018. 85-100.
• "Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction." Introduction to special issue of Victorian Studies 60.4 (Summer 2018): 537-42.
• "Ecology." Special Keywords issue of Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2018): 653-56.
• “William Morris and the Form and Politics of Replication.” In Nineteenth Century Replication and Its Digital Legacy. Eds. Linda Hughes and Julie Codell. Edinburgh UP, 2018. 144-61.
• “Reading in Review: The Victorian Book Review in the New Media Moment.” Victorian Periodicals Review 49.4 (Winter 2016): 626-42. Special issue on “Moments of Challenge and Change.”
• “Dendrography and Ecological Realism.” Victorian Studies 58.4 (Summer 2016): 696-718.
• “Liberation Ecologies, 1871.” Contribution to a symposium-in-print on Kristin Ross’s Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, 2015). The Journal of William Morris Studies 21.4 (Summer 2016): 8-16.
• “Sex and Socialism.” Review essay. Public Books, 1 September 2016, http://www.publicbooks.org/multigenre/sex-and-socialism
• "William Morris, Extraction Capitalism, and the Aesthetics of Surface." Victorian Studies. 57.3 (Spring 2015): 395-404.
• "Journalism." Bernard Shaw in Context. Ed. Brad Kent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 127-34.
• "Twilight of the Idylls: Wilde, Tennyson, and Fin de Siècle Anti-Idealism." Victorian Literature and Culture 43.1 (March 2015): 115-30.
• "Reconsidering Vera; Or, the Nihilists." Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives. Ed. Joseph Bristow. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. 65-84.
• "Exile London: Immigration, Xenophobia, and Anarchism in Late-Victorian Literature." Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia. Ed. Maria Bachman, Heidi Kaufman, and Marlene Tromp. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. 267-83.
• "Tom Maguire: 'An Under-Paid Agitator' in the Late-Victorian Socialist Press." Philological Quarterly 91.1 (Winter 2012): 75-96.
• "Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste." Journal of Modern Craft  4.1 (March 2011): 7-25.
• "Literature and the Late-Victorian Radical Press." Literature Compass 7.8 (August 2010): 702-12.
• "Body, Spirit, Print: The Radical Autobiographies of Annie Besant and Helen and Olivia Rossetti." Feminist Studies 35.2 (Summer 2009): 1-28.
• "William Morris, Print Culture, and the Politics of Aestheticism." Modernism/Modernity 15.3 (September 2008): 477-502.
• "Collections and Collectivity: William Morris in the Rare Book Room." Journal of William Morris Studies. 17.2 (Summer 2007): 73-88.
• "'At a Distance from the Scene of the Atrocity': Death and Detachment in Poe's 'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.'" Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture. Ed. Lucy E. Frank. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2007. 173-188.
• "'Shrewd Women of Business': Madame Rachel, Victorian Consumerism, and The Sorceress of the Strand." Victorian Literature and Culture 34.1 (Spring 2006): 311-332.
• "Trouble with She-Dicks: Private Eyes and Public Women in The Adventures of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective." Victorian Literature and Culture 33.1 (Spring 2005): 47-65.
• "''The Inward Revolution'": Sexual Terrorism in The Princess Casamassima." The Henry James Review 24.2 (Spring 2003): 146-167.