Karen Miller

Dr. Miller’s first book, Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit (New York University Press, 2014) combined a study of racial formation and urban policy with a consideration of black activism. As African Americans made clearer and more strident claims about their right to full equality, she shows, white liberal leaders used the discourse of northern racial liberalism to both respond to and manage those demands. In 2021, Miller published an illustrated and abridged version of that book called How American City Leaders Built Segregated Neighborhoods while Disavowing Racism (Cambridge: MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2021).

Dr. Miller’s recent publications include:

Books

• Prehistories of the War on Terror: A Critical Genealogy, edited with Yumi Lee (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).
• How American City Leaders Built Segregated Neighborhoods while Disavowing Racism (Cambridge: MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2021).
• Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

Articles and Book Chapters

• Agents of the Settler State: Incarcerated Filipino Workers, Conjugal Migration, and Indigenous Dispossession in the American Colonial Philippines,” American Quarterly 76, no. 1 (March 2024), 25-53.
• “Terrains of Dissent: Muslim Land Dispossession, Coloniality, and Terror in the 1930s and the Contemporary Philippines,” in Prehistories of the War on Terror (2024), 25-53.
• “‘Thin, Wistful, and White’: James Fugate and Colonial Bureaucratic Masculinity in the Philippines, 1900-1938.” American Quarterly 71, no. 4 (December 2019), 921-944.
• “Agricultural Commodities on the Philippine Frontier: State-Sponsored Resettlement and Ecological Distress in the 1930s” in Commodity Frontiers and Global Capitalist Expansion (2019), 57-78.