Cecilia Miller

Cecilia Miller is an historian of ideas. She is Professor of History, and Tutor in the College of Social Studies (CSS), at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she has taught since 1991.

As an Enlightenment scholar, her research interests are in the history of European ideas broadly defined, from antiquity to the present.

Cecilia Miller won the Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Wesleyan in 2002. She was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin, in Germany, from 1996-1997, and she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Columbia University, 1989-1991. Cecilia Miller received her D.Phil. in Modern History from Balliol College, University of Oxford, in 1988. Her doctoral supervisor was Sir Isaiah Berlin. Her revised doctoral thesis was published as Giambattista Vico: Imagination and Historical Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1993).

She has given many lectures from her research on Political Fiction. These lectures include "Renzo, the Failed Revolutionary, in Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi," for Yale University's Department of Italian on October 12, 2006; "Candide in European Intellectual History: Uniforms, Monkeys, and Ravenous Women," for the Columbia University Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Culture on November 16, 2006; "Don Quixote Reconsidered: Sancho Panza on Good Government and the Origins of the Market Economy," for New York University's Department of Economics Colloquium on Market Institutions and Processes on January 29, 2007; and "Matriarchy and Meritocracy in Gulliver's Travels: Plato's Republic as Swiftian Ur-Text," at the Harvard Humanities Seminar in 18th Century Studies at the Barker Humanities Center at Harvard University on April 4, 2008.

Born in Los Angeles, Cecilia Miller grew up around the world, giving her an unusual perspective in her intellectual pursuits. In her research, she uses French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin.

In the summer of 2013, she walked the Camino de Santiago, the medieval pilgrim path in Spain.

She spent the summer of 2016 at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, where she was studying Neo-Confucianism.