Holy Cross History Professor Awarded NEH Grant for Humanities Research

WORCESTER, Mass. – Gwenn A. Miller, assistant professor of history, has been awarded a fellowship by The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). She will receive $30,000 for seven months of work from January through July of 2008.  The NEH fellowship is awarded to individuals pursuing advanced research in the humanities that contributes to scholarly knowledge or to the general public's greater understanding of the humanities.

Miller specializes in early American history, specifically the Russian colonization of Alaska. During the seven months, she will be working on a book about relations between native people and Europeans in Russian America (Alaska) during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

"The competition for these highly prestigious fellowships is always fierce,” says Timothy Austin, vice president for academic affairs and dean at the College of the Holy Cross. “Professor Miller has clearly convinced her fellow historians that the project she is pursuing promises to affect her field in quite significant ways. We are delighted that she will be able to press ahead aggressively during her leave and then bring her expertise back to the classroom for the benefit of her students."

After the book is published, Miller plans to move on to new comparative projects.  She says, “I am particularly interested in stretching the bounds of traditional American history both through my teaching and through my scholarly work.”

Miller, a member of the Holy Cross faculty since 2004, earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from Duke University and her B.A. from Bowdoin College. Miller was an instructor and teaching assistant at Duke University; prior to that she taught history at the high school level. She is the author of an essay, titled “Contact and Conquest in Colonial North America” in A Companion to American Women’s History edited by Nancy A. Hewitt (Blackwell, 2002) and published another essay titled “The Perfect Mistress of Russian Economy: Sighting the Intimate on a Colonial Alaskan Terrain, 1784-1821," in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler (Duke University Press, 2006). She resides in Jamaica Plain, Mass.