U.C. Davis History Department - Faculty

Susan Miller
Associate Professor

E: sgmiller@ucdavis.edu
T: 530-752-0656
O: 3219 SSH

Academic Biography

Susan Gilson Miller is a historian of North African and Mediterranean history, with a special interest in Jewish history. Her undergraduate degree in Modern European history is from Wellesley College. She has an MA degree in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in Modern Middle Eastern and North African History from the University of Michigan. She has taught at Wellesley College, Brandeis University, and from 1990 until 2008, at Harvard University, where she headed the Program in North African Studies. She is working on a new book tentatively entitled: “The Making of Modern Morocco: 1820-2000” (Cambridge University Press), a study of contemporary Moroccan history in its global context.

Research Interests

Colonial and post-colonial North African history, Mediterranean Jewish history, urban forms and cultures of the Mediterranean region.

Selected Publications

The Architecture and Memory of the Minority Quarter of the Muslim Mediterranean City. With Mauro Bertagnin, Architect. Aga Khan Program on Islamic Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, January 2009.

“The Mellah of Fez: Reflections on the Spatial Turn in Moroccan Jewish History,” Jewish Topographies; Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, ed. A. Nocke, J. Brauch, A. Lipphardt. London, Ashgate, 2008.

“Les quartiers juifs de la Méditerranée et leur héritage architectural. Identités Sépharades et Modernité. ed. J-C Lasry, J. Lévy, Y. Cohen. Montreal: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2007.

In the Shadow of the Sultan: Culture, Power and Politics in Morocco. Introduced and edited by Susan Gilson Miller and Rahma Bourqia. Middle East Monograph Series 31, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France in 1845-1846. The Voyage of Muhammad as-Saffar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Winner of the Ibn Batuta Award for Travel Literature, the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation, 2006.

Courses Taught

112A and 112B: Topics in Pre-modern and Modern Jewish history 115F: The history of North Africa 102/201: Port cities of the Mediterranean