April Miller is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University. She is a scholar of film history and interdisciplinary modernism who holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from The University of Rochester and an M.A. and B.A., Honors in English from the University of Alberta.
Professor Miller’s research is highly interdisciplinary, focusing primarily on the intersections between literature, film, legal studies, and other socio-scientific concerns such as criminality and mental illness. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Offending Women: Modernism, Crime and Creative Production, which investigates the female criminal and her often overlapping sites of representation in literature, journalism, and silent film between 1900 and 1930. This project considers how nascent criminological discourses, and an increasing popular concern with crime and its causes, rendered visible new, often-violent modes of female subjectivity that challenged long-standing assumptions about class, race, and gender. While much of Miller’s research focuses on silent film, several of her pending publications testify to her interest in contemporary genre cinema, particularly the horror film, and French avant-garde film. These projects range from examinations of the folkloric representation of menstruation and the reproductive body in the Canadian film Ginger Snaps to the gendering of the economic recession in recent American horror films and thrillers like Drag Me To Hell and Contagion. She has also conducted preliminary research for a larger project on representations of espionage in British, French, and American cinema during the interwar period.
Miller has taught introductory and advanced courses in a wide range of subjects, from genre studies of melodramas, musicals, crime, and horror films to survey courses in film theory at the graduate and undergraduate level. She has taught senior seminars such as “Framing Madness,” which encouraged students to explore the gendering of “madness” in literature and documentary and narrative cinema; and “Stardom and Celebrity,” a media studies course that examined the changing nature of stardom from the silent period through today’s media-saturated world.
April Miller joined the faculty of Barrett in 2013. Prior to joining ASU, she was a tenured Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies at the University of Northern Colorado.