简介

Dr. Jason Miller’s research interests include twentieth-century American Poetry, American Literature, literary theory, and pedagogy. Professor Miller serves the department as Associate Head and Director of Undergraduate Studies. His book Origins of the Dream: Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric traces Martin Luther King, Jr.'s use of Langston Hughes's poetry in his sermons and speeches from 1956-1968. This work is also the subject of a documentary film project currently being made in partnership with the Southern Documentary Fund. His King's First Dream project is making the first ever recording of Dr. Martin Luther's King "I Have a Dream" speech available online. This speech took place in Rocky Mount, North Carolina a full eight months before King's famous speech at the March on Washington in 1963. The project has received coverage on the CBS and ABC National Evening News, the BBC, and in USA Today. Articles have been published in Canada and Japan and even translated into Dutch and Italian. Dr. Miller was also interviewed on NPR and live on CNN. His earlier book Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture investigates the nearly three dozen poems written by Hughes to reveal the complex interplay between politics, culture, and art. It addresses key poems such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Christ in Alabama,” and “Dream Deferred.” In addition to publishing articles on Langston Hughes, Professor Miller has written about how he uses the sculptures of Auguste Rodin to teach Willa Cather’s My Antonia. A published poet, he has also contributed entries on blues and gospel music to the New Anthology of American Poetry published by Rutgers University Press as well as insight into teaching William Faulkner that has been published and reprinted. Dr. Miller completed his undergraduate and MA degrees at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and his PhD at Washington State University where he served as the English Department’s Charles Blackburn Teaching Fellow. Jason has served as an Executive Committee member of the National Council of Teachers of English’s Assembly on American Literature and Final Judge for the Raleigh Fine Arts Society annual writing contest. He is currently on the board of NC State's African American Cultural Center and serves as a member of the university’s Caldwell Fellows Selection Committee.