Flagg Miller

My career has been devoted to revisiting American perceptions of Islam with a broader range of cultural, historical, and linguistic insights. My interest in Islam and the Arab world began shortly after high school, when I left Kansas City to live with a host family in Tunisia for a year under the American Field Service program. Later in college, I pursued Middle Eastern studies while majoring in English literature, writing a senior thesis on the narratives of early British travelers to the Arab world that included my own field research on Tuareg nomads in Niger. For this project I was awarded Dartmouth College's John Ledyard Award in 1991. After a year in Syria studying Arabic on a Fulbright Grant and a Master of Studies degree in social anthropology at Oxford University, I spent two years in Yemen and completed my doctorate in linguistic and cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan. This work led to the production of my first book, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen (2007), which explores how Yemenis have used traditional poetry to re-imagine the positive role that tribalism might play in progressive Muslim reform. Funding for such research included a Fulbright grant as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, and the American Institute for Yemeni Studies.I am currently bringing my research interests to a collection of over 1,500 audiocassettes formerly owned by Osama Bin Laden. I was invited to study the collection in 2003, when the tapes were transferred from CNN's Islamabad office to the Williams College Afghan Media Project. More recently, I have been working with Yale University, where the tapes have been moved, to produce a reference index. I am writing a book about the collection that draws from my research experience in Yemen, Bin Laden's ancestral homeland. Much of this project involves studying the verbal and symbolic resources that militants use to bend religion toward violence. Central to this task is a better understanding of Bin Laden's cassette collection as an archive not simply of a single "voice" or "organization," but of a dissonant range of recorded material whose congruity requires creative acts of interpretation. Funding for this research has been supplied or offered by the University of Wisconsin, the University of California, Davis, the National Humanities Center, and the American Council for Learned Societies.After teaching in anthropology departments at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I joined the Religious Studies program at the University of California, Davis in 2007. My research interests are pursued through active engagement with students. While teaching courses on Islam, comparative religion, language, media studies, and performance, I have continued to publish my work in such journals as American Ethnologist, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of Language and Communication, and the Journal of Women's History. I have also written the preface to Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (University of Iowa Press, 2007), the first collection of poems written by detainees at Guantánamo Bay.
 

Education

M.Studies (1993-1994) Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University, (England); Ph.D. (1994-2001) Linguistic Anthropology, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)
 

Experience

Associate Professor, Religious Studies, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, Summer 2007-present
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology and Religious Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Fall 2004-Spring 2007
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago, Fall 2002-Spring 2003

Expertise

Religious Studies, Linguistic Anthropology, Yemen and the Arab World