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Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies

The Miller Center brings together faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and staff within the University of Maryland as well as scholars and teachers throughout the state of Maryland and the larger region to discuss important historical issues.

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The Center's Goals

The Center was established in 1999 to create a flourishing environment for the study of history at the University of Maryland. In 2006, the Center was renamed the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies to honor the generous endowment of two Maryland alumni who took a special interest in history.

The Miller Center brings together faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and staff within the University as well as scholars and teachers throughout the state of Maryland and the larger region to discuss important historical issues, both old and new, from ancient times to the present, and pertinent to all areas of the world, from the US and Europe to Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Through such discussions, the Miller Center hopes to increase an appreciation of the importance of historical knowledge in the education of citizens, to underline the significance of universities in producing and disseminating new ways of exploring the world, and to generate excitement about the processes of intellectual inquiry, exchange, and debate.

Every year the Miller Center runs a seminar series on its annual theme. It sponsors scholarly conferences and works-in-progress seminars with faculty members and it also awards research grants.

For more information or to join our email list, email millercenter@umd.edu. 

Events View All Miller Center and History Department Events

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Schedule of Events 2023-24

Fall 2023:

Antoine Borrut and Michele Lamprakos
University of Maryland
Thursday, October 19, 2023
12:30 PM
Taliaferro 2110

"History, Memory, and Oblivion in Medieval Islam"

 

Katrina Keane and Mircea Raianu
University of Maryland 
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
4:00 PM

"AI in the Classroom"

 

Paul Landau and André Odendaal
University of Maryland
Thursday, November 9th, 2023
12:30 PM
Taliaferro 2110

"Dear Comrade President"

 

David Mwambari
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium
Thursday, December 7th, 2023
12:30 PM
Online on Zoom

"The Politics of Vernacular Memory in Post-Colonial African Contexts"

 

Spring 2024:

Sarah Cameron and Jayson Porter
University of Maryland 
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
12:15 PM

"Environmental History Beyond Academia: Cotton, Storytelling, Environmental Justice"

 

Patrick Chung
University of Maryland 
Thursday, April 4, 2024
4:00 PM

"Ending the Korean War: Political Education and Permanent War"

 

Maren Poitras
University of Maryland 
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
4:00 PM

"Finding the Money"

Past Events

Spring 2023:

László Jakab Orsós

Vice President of Arts & Culture,
Brooklyn Public Library
Friday, February 10, 2023
12:00 PM
on Zoom only

"Libraries and Our World"

 

Christen Mucher

Associate Professor of American Studies,
Smith College

Thursday, February 23, 2023
4:00 PM
Taliaferro 2110 and on Zoom (hybrid)

"Before American History: Unsettling Indigeneity in the Early US and Mexico"

 

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury
Senior Lecturer of Sociology and Anthropology,
Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

Thursday, March 2, 2023
12:00 PM
on Zoom only

"Citizenship as Accumulation by Dispossession: The Case of Palestinian Indigenous"

 

Elizabeth Rule
Assistant Professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Cultural Studies,
American University
Monday, March 13, 2023
4:00 PM
Taliaferro 2110 and on Zoom (hybrid)

"Guide to Indigenous D.C."

 

Krista Goff
Associate Professor of History,
University of Miami
Monday, April 17, 2023
4:00 PM
Taliaferro 2110 and on Zoom (hybrid)

"Indigeneity, Ethnogenesis, and Power Politics in the Soviet Caucasus"

 

Fall 2022:

Michael Zakim
Tel-Aviv University 
September 19, 2022 @ 12 noon
Taliaferro 2110 and on Zoom (hybrid)

"Paper and Power: On the Phenomenology of Accounting Books, Statistical Tables, and Photographs"

 

Fei-Hsien Wang
Indiana University, Bloomington 
October 7, 2022 @ 12 noon
Taliaferro 2110 and on Zoom (hybrid)

"Why Alternative Histories Are More Popular: China's Post-Imperial Fantasies"

 

Corinna Zeltsman
Princeton University
October 21, 2022 @ 12 noon
Taliaferro 2110 and on Zoom (hybrid)

"The Materiality and Politics of Information in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: The Printing Shop and the Paper Mill"

 

Jessica Ratcliff
Princeton University
October 28, 2022 @ 12 noon
on Zoom

"Natural Monopoly: Collecting, Colonial Science, and the East India Company's Library-Museum in London, 1757-1858"

 

Spring 2022:

Alexander Rehding
Harvard University 
February 18, 2022 @ 12 noon
2110 Taliaferro Hall
"In the Ears of the Beholder: From Grooves to Music on the Voyager Golden Record"

 

Jennifer Morgan 
New York University
March 11, 2022 @ 12 noon
On Zoom
Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

 

Jeffrey Herf 
University of Maryland
April 12, 2022 @ 12 noon
On Zoom
"Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949"; book link HERE

Mircea Raianu 
University of Maryland
April 28, 2022 @ 12 noon
On Zoom
"Tata: The Global Corporation that Built Indian Capitalism"; book link HERE

Christine Kirschner
University of Maryland 
May 6, 2022 @ 12 noon
2110 Taliaferro
"The Archives on the Moon: A Reflection on Digital Historical Research during the COVID-19 Pandemic"

Academic Year 2020-21:

inset image
This round table concludes the Miller Center’s 2020-2021 series on interrogation and historical analysis. We have invited three authors who are producing exciting new research on this theme. Professor Afinogenov (Georgetown) is a specialist of Imperial Russia and his first book, Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power (Harvard University Press, 2020) looks at the construction of a Russian intelligence network in Qing Dynasty China between 1650 and 1850. Professor Kim (Wisconsin-Madison) is a specialist of diplomatic history, her latest book The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (2019) focusing on the Korean War. Professor McCormick (Syracuse U.) works on Latin American and Caribbean history. Her latest book is The Logic of Compromise: Authoritarianism, Betrayal, and Revolution in Rural Mexico, 1935-1965 (2016) and she is now working on the history of dirty war and torture in Mexico since the 1970s. A Q and A will follow the three presentations.

 

Inset image

Director

Christopher Bonner

Associate Professor, History

2122 Taliaferro Hall
College Park MD, 20742

(301) 405-8739

Additional Resources