Tracy Miller

Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture

Tracy Miller (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is a specialist in the history of Asian art and architecture, especially the ritual architecture of imperial China. Her research focuses on the impact of belief in divinity on the production of art, architecture, and larger spaces for spiritual encounters. She is author of The Divine Nature of Power: Chinese Ritual Architecture at the Sacred Site of Jinci (Harvard University Asia Center) and has recently completed a monograph on the use of Indic and Inner Eurasian design strategies in the Buddhist temple architecture of Early Medieval and Medieval China. Her articles have appeared in The Art Bulletin, Asia Major, Archives of Asian Art, and Artibus Asiae, among other venues. Active in the Digital Cultural Heritage community, Miller is co-PI of the ATTCAT (Annotation and Translation of Traditional Chinese Architecture Terminology) Project, an international collaborative research initiative dedicated to the study of the technical terminology used to describe traditional Chinese architecture, past and present. Research from this project is “born-digital” and published online through the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus. Longer scholarly ATTCAT annotations are published with illustrative images on  ArchitecturaSinica.org, an open-source research website for the study of Traditional Chinese Architecture she developed with colleagues at Vanderbilt University. Terminology published on ArchitecturaSinica.org is also linked to geolocated, in situ, built examples (where available), allowing users to investigate annotated ATTCAT technical terms through both textual and living architectural contexts simultaneously.