Education:

• Ph.D., History and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Michigan (1976)
• M.A., Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University (1964)
• B.A., , History, Wellesley College (1963)

Biography:

Susan Gilson Miller teaches upper division courses on the history of North Africa and on Jews of the non-Western world. She also teaches graduate seminars on diverse topics, including Mediterranean history, the Algerian War, women’s history, and Muslim-Jewish relations. Her field of research is the history of North Africa in the modern period, with a special interest in colonial and post-colonial Morocco. She has worked on historical themes relating to travel, urbanism and urban architecture, sacred space, minority histories, and most recently, refugees, migration, and humanitarian relief.

Her publications include A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib (Indiana University Press, 2010, co-edited with Katherine Hoffman) The Architecture and Memory of the Minority Quarter of the Muslim Mediterranean City (Harvard University Press, 2010), and Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France in 1845-1846. (University of California Press, 1992). Her work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, French, and Chinese. Her new project is a book on Hélène Cazes Benatar, the first Moroccan woman lawyer, disbarred by the Vichy regime because of her Jewish background. During World War II she organized a refugee relief program in Morocco that directed escapees from Nazi-ruled Europe to safe havens in the Western Hemisphere.

Prof. Miller is the recipient of two Fulbright Awards, and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Lucius Littauer Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the University of Cambridge, and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. In her free time, she gardens, rides her bike on the Davis green belt, enjoys movies at the Varsity Cinema, and travels off the beaten track with her life-partner David Miller, who teaches international development in the College of Agriculture.

Contact:

sgmiller@ucdavis.edu