For best experience please turn on javascript and use a modern browser!
You are using a browser that is no longer supported by Microsoft. Please upgrade your browser. The site may not present itself correctly if you continue browsing.

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 2021 I co-edited the collection Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism.

    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 with Communicology: Fragments from Vilém Flusser’s Bochum Lectures, will be published in 2024.

    I am also the author of numerous academic articles, book chapters, and reviews that have been published in such venues as New Literary HistoryArizona Quarterly,Radical PhilosophyContemporary LiteraturesymplokēThe 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.

    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, experimental 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

    2024

    • Miller, M. F. (in press). “Technical Rationality and the Environmental Turn”. symplokē , 32(1-2).

    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

    • Miller, M. (2024). Responsible AI 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