Paul B. Miller

Associate Professor of French
Associate Professor of Jewish Studies

After more than a decade as a Spanish professor, I was delighted to join the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt in the Fall of 2010.  My PhD was in Comparative Literature and I am committed to comparative approaches to the literatures, languages, music and cultures of the Francophone, Hispanic and Anglophone Caribbean. My book, Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination, was published in May, 2010 by the University of Virginia Press.  In it, I discuss the legacy and re-evaluation of the impact of the Enlightenment in the Caribbean as reflected in six modern Caribbean authors from across linguistic and national boundaries.

My current book project Windward Passages: Haitian and Cuban Writers in Dialogue (under contract with the University of Virginia Press)  constellates key moments of cultural exchange and dialogue between Cuban and Haitian writers in an intellectual genealogy leading from the Haitian to the Cuban Revolution.  Essays from this monograph have appeared recently in the journal Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and in a volume published in Cuba, Toussaint Louverture: Repensar un icono.

In addition to French and Latin American literature courses I also introduced into the curriculum at Vanderbilt a course on Latin American and Caribbean Jewish writers that I have taught in Spanish and English.  I have an ongoing book project on this topic entitled “The Dialectics of Tradition and Assimilation in Latin American and Caribbean Jewish Writing” and have published several essays on this topic.

In addition to my teaching and scholarship I have enjoyed leading study abroad groups to Aix-en-Provence as the Professeur-en-Residence of Vanderbilt-in-France; Madrid as the Director of the Vanderbilt-in-Spain, to Cuba in a Vanderbilt “Maymester” and on several trips to Cuernavaca, México.

In my spare time I enjoy playing basketball with students and faculty at the Rec Center, tennis at the Currey Tennis Center,  and playing jazz, classical, flamenco and rock and roll guitar.