Cristanne Miller

Who is Cristanne Miller?

Cristanne Miller is Edward H. Butler Professor of English and Chair of the Department at the University at Buffalo in New York. She received her PhD in 1980 from the University of Chicago, and was for many years the W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor at Pomona College. She has also served as President of the Emily Dickinson International Society.

Miller established her reputation as a foremost scholar of Emily Dickinson with the publication in 1987 of Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar. Martha Nell Smith reviewed the book enthusiastically, calling Miller an "exciting reader" of Dickinson with "close and thoughtful interpretation" and a view of the poems as "communicative, not solipsistic acts." David Porter praised Miller for showing "readers what is actually at stake in this idiosyncratic verse and maps better than anyone to date the links between the grammatical choices and literary identity." Tom Paulin's review in the London Review of Books concluded that Cristanne Miller's "densely researched study" offered a "living and contemporary" reading of Dickinson's poems. "Miller works from the assumption that Dickinson sees herself 'oppositionally, defining her position in the world negatively, by distance from some social construct or law'. And Miller shows how those negations have a constructive role." Other reviewers were similarly enthusiastic. She has been fellow at the Free University of Berlin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of Oxford. She currently edits The Emily Dickinson Journal.