Welcome! I am an interdisciplinary scholar, educator, and curator working at the intersections of the oceanic humanities, the global Black radical tradition, and cultural histories of infrastructure and empire. I research the intellectual histories and political cultures of the Black diaspora and Third World Left throughout the twentieth century. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Geography Department at the University of California Berkeley (USA) and a Curatorial Fellow at IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture (Netherlands).
I am particularly interested in processes of political education and practices of solidarity within labor, antiracist, feminist, and anticolonial struggles. I approach this work both with a desire to understand the past and in order to draw lessons for the present. My curatorial process is informed by my geographical training, and I am particularly drawn to the work of artists who denaturalize dominant narratives of place and landscape and whose work explores questions of memory, identity, and futurity through relational and transnational paradigms. Likewise, teaching and scholarship take inspiration from my creative and curatorial endeavors, resisting hierarchies of “expertise.”
Please contact me if you are interested in collaborating on interdisciplinary/multimedia exhibitions; building intentional and experimental platforms with community-based archives; rethinking the ruttier, sea shanty, and other modes of oceanic storytelling through decolonial perspectives; or researching creative combinations of people, ideas, art, and technologies in the service of more just planetary futures.
email: maemiller@berkeley.edu
——
Menu Photo Credits (Left to Right): (1) Author selfie; (2) Negro Worker sketch, Hermina Huiswoud Papers, NYU Tamiment Archive; (3) Deborah Jack, Drawn by Water, Act 3, Still from “A Thousand Secrets;” (4) Exhibition Installation View of “50 Years of Bogle L’Ouverture Book Publishers,” Gunnersbury Park Museum, London; (5) Reading Room at Working Class Movement Library, Salford, UK, Taken by author; (6) Deborah Jack, Drawn by Water, Act 3, Still from “A Thousand Secrets” Exhibition