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Dr M.F. (Michael) Miller

Faculty of Humanities
Capaciteitsgroep Engelse taal en cultuur

Visiting address
  • Spuistraat 134
  • Room number: 5.32
Postal address
  • Postbus 1641
    1000 BP Amsterdam
Contact details
Social media
  • Profile

    I began working at the UvA in 2021 as Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Culture. After receiving my PhD from Rice University in 2019, I served as a Spatial Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Rice's Humanities Research Center from 2019-2020. My writing and teaching focus on the intersections between contemporary Anglophone literature and culture, critical media studies, film studies, and literary and cultural theory. In 2024 I was awarded a "Responsible AI" grant by the UvA's Teaching and Learning Center for the course "Literary Theory." The aim of the project is to improve students' writing skills, foster critical AI literacies, and help students understand the ethical and social impacts of GenAI. You can read more about my grant project here.

    With Siegfried Zielinski, Aaron Jaffe, and Silvia Wagnermaier I am co-editing the first English translation of Vilém Flusser's final lectures delivered at Bochum University in 1991. This project, titled Thinking Further: Fragments of Communicology from Vilém Flusser’s Bochum Lectures, will be published in the University of Minnesota Press' "Electronic Mediations" series in 2025. And in 2021 I co-edited the collection Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism.

    I am also the author of numerous academic articles, book chapters, and reviews that have been published in such venues as New Literary HistorysymplokēArizona Quarterly,Radical PhilosophyContemporary LiteratureThe Journal of Film and Videoboundary 2 online review, and Modernism/modernity Print Plus, among others. Currently, I am finishing a monograph titled Proximity by Proxy: Contemporary Literature in the Age of Social Media and numerous commissioned articles and book chapters.

    My long-standing interest in the material-ecological foundations of born-digital cultural production has led me to my second major book project. Tentatively titled (Un)Critical Platforms: Technical Rationality and the Environmental Turn, the book examines how the complex and entangled relations between the material and ecological constraints of computational systems shape cultural production and philosophy. The book puts the cultural production of tech-savvy contemporary writers, electronic musician-programmers such as Holly Herndon, and the linguistic outputs of LLMs and GPT architectures in conversation with literary theory, eco-philosophy, and critical AI studies. With this project I am interested in exploring the theoretical, political, and aesthetic effects that arise when there is no onto-epistemological outside to the constitutive structures, systems, and platforms that comprise our twenty-first century media ecologies.

    Current or potential BA and MA students interested in supervision are encouraged to reach out.

  • Publications

    2026

    • Miller, M. F. (2026). “Programming the Self: Autopoetics as Authorship in the Work of Holly Herndon and Sasha Stiles”. Manuscript in preparation. In B. J. Faulk (Ed.), The Global Music Novel as World Literature Bloomsbury Academic.

    2025

    • Miller, M. F. (2025). “Capture, Control, and Boolean Operators in Pynchon’s Vineland”. Manuscript in preparation.
    • Miller, M. F., Jaffe, A. (Ed.), Zielinski, S. (Ed.), & Wagnermeier, S. (Ed.) (in press). Thinking Further: Fragments of Communicology from Vilém Flusser’s Bochum Lectures. (Electronic Mediations). University of Minnesota Press.

    2024

    2023

    2022

    • Jaffe, A., Martini, R., & Miller, M. F. (2022). Introduction. In A. Jaffe, R. Martini, & M. F. Miller (Eds.), Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism (pp. 1-11). (Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism). Bloomsbury Academic. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501348464.0006 [details]
    • Jaffe, A., Martini, R., & Miller, M. F. (Eds.) (2022). Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism. (Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism). Bloomsbury Academic. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501348464 [details]

    2020

    • Miller, M. F. (2020). "Platforms of Control: Social Media and the Limits of Theoretical Pluralism". symplokē , 28(1-2), 149-62. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/773848
    • Miller, M. F. (2020). "Review of Siegfried Zielinski's Variations on Media Thinking (2019)". symplokē , 28(1-2), 590-92.

    2019

    • Miller, M. F. (2019). "Why Hate the Internet?: Contemporary Fiction, Digital Culture, and the Politics of Social Media". Arizona Quarterly, 75(3), 59-85.
    • Miller, M. F., & Bailar, M. (2019). Interview with Sheila Heti. Contemporary Literature, 60(2), 146-73.

    2018

    • Miller, M. F. (2018). "Hyperobject". In J. R. Di Leo (Ed.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (pp. 522-23). Bloomsbury Academic.
    • Miller, M. F. (2018). "Stan Brakhage's Autopsy: The act of seeing with one's own eyes". Journal of Film and Video, 70(2), 59-85.
    • Miller, M. F. (2018). “A Thousand Plateaus for Neocon Bros: A Review of Brian Massumi’s Ontopower: War, Powers and the State of Perception”. symplokē , 26(1-2), 443-451.

    2017

    • Miller, M. F. (2017). "The Aesthetic (re-)Turn: Matter and Method, or Objects and Ontology?". symplokē , 24(1-2), 507-11.
    • Miller, M. F. (2017). “Seeing Ourselves, Loving Our Captors: A Review of Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age". Boundary 2, Online Review.

    2019

    Prize / grant

    Journal editor

    • Miller, M. (editor) (2022). Flusser Studies (Journal).

    Talk / presentation

    • Miller, M. (speaker) (2024). "Technical Rationality and the Environmental Turn", Society for Critical Exchange.
    • Miller, M. (speaker) (2024). Out of the Lab and Into the Theory Seminar; or, When LLMs meet Deconstruction.
    This list of publications is extracted from the UvA-Current Research Information System. Questions? Ask the library or the Pure staff of your faculty / institute. Log in to Pure to edit your publications. Log in to Personal Page Publication Selection tool to manage the visibility of your publications on this list.
  • Ancillary activities
    No ancillary activities