Email Address:
hsmiller@southalabama.edu
Phone Number:
(251) 460-7547
Location:
HUMB 377
On leave Spring 2025

Harry Miller

Department of History

Biography

B.A., Wesleyan University
M.A., Columbia University
Ph.D., Columbia University

Harry Miller is a native of Baltimore, Maryland and received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1988. While at Wesleyan, he studied abroad in Beijing and Nanjing, China, and developed a strong interest in Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasty history. After graduating from college with a major in East Asian Studies, he spent an adventuresome four years in Taiwan, where he worked for a locally-owned container ship company and often explored Hualien and Taitung Counties on moped. Taking the long way back to the United States, he circumnavigated the globe, visiting Japan, China, Russia, Hungary, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

Ultimately returning to academia, he earned his doctorate from Columbia University in 2001. Dr. Miller has been at the University of South Alabama since 2002, teaching survey courses on Asia, introductions to Asian film, and advanced classes on China, Japan, Westernization, and other aspects of intellectual history. He is also in charge of USA in Japan, a study abroad program in Hakodate, Japan. He has published two books on the late Ming and early Qing and has translated an early Chinese classic. He is currently writing a novel set in seventeenth-century China.

Dr. Miller loves Mobile, where he lives with his wife and three children. He enjoys canoeing in nearby rivers.

Publications

Books

Southern Rain: A Novel of Seventeenth Century China. Earnshaw Books, 2018.
The Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
State versus Gentry in Early Qing Dynasty China, 1644-1699. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
State versus Gentry in Late Ming Dynasty China, 1572-1644. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Review of Ming China, 1368-1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire. By John W. Dardess. Journal of Asian Studies, 71.2 (May 2012), pp. 515-517.
(Translator) ‘Li Sancai.’ Ming History English Translation Project. http://chinesestudies.ucsd.edu/.
Review of Pepper Mountain: The Life, Death, and Posthumous Career of Yang Jisheng. By Kenneth Hammond. Ming Studies, 61 (April, 2010), pp. 73-77.
"Wishful Thinking about Zhu Yuanzhang in Late Ming Historical and Political Discourse." In Long Live the Emperor: The Uses of the Ming Founder Across Six Centuries of East Asian History, ed. Sarah Schneewind. Minneapolis: Society for Ming Studies, 2008.
"Opposition to the Donglin Faction in the Late Ming Dynasty: The Case of Tang Binyin." Late Imperial China, vol. 27, no. 2 (December, 2006), pp. 38-66.
"Newly-Discovered Source Sheds Light on Late Ming Faction: Reading Li Sancai’s Fu Huai Xiao Cao." Ming Studies, 47 (Spring, 2003), pp. 126-140.

Courses

HY 103 History of Asian Civilization I
HY 104 History of Asian Civilization II
HY/CA/LG 384 Japanese History in Film and Literature
HY 366 History of Traditional China
HY 367 History of Modern China (W)
HY 368 History of Japan
HY 442: Undergraduate Research Seminar: Gabriele D'Annunzio and His Times
HY 461/561 History of the Ming Dynasty
HY 461/561 The Westernization of Asia
HY 461/561 The Intellectual and His Constituency
HY 461/561 Democracy in Asia
HY 461/561 Women in Asian History and Literature
Study Abroad in Japan