Stephen Miller, Ph.D.

miller
Stephen Miller, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

1401 University Blvd.

HHB 360Q
Birmingham, AL 35294-1152

205-975-6531
Stephen Miller completed his doctorate at UCLA in 1999. Three year-long research grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Chancellor of UCLA, and the UCLA history department, as well as a Faculty Development Grant from UAB, permitted Dr. Miller to complete research for a book about eighteenth-century France and the Revolution. The book shows that positions of political authority such as seigneurial domains and venal offices were central to the wealth and status of the nobility and bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century France. This insight allows Dr. Miller to show that social forces played a critical role in the origins and unfolding of the French Revolution. Miller documents this thesis with meticulous research on the old regime province of Languedoc. His work can be seen in several articles in journals including French Historical Studies, The Journal of Social History, and European History Quarterly. The book, State and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: A Study of Political Power and Social Revolution in Languedoc, was published in 2008. Miller's next project, for which he has received grants from the American Philosophical Society and the Faculty Development Program of UAB, analyzes the monarchy's efforts to reform its institutions by creating provincial assemblies of landowners in the 1770s and 1780s. 

Education:
PhD History UCLA 1999
Master's UCLA 1994
BA University of Wisconsin, Madison 1991

Research Interests: 
European and French history from 1600 to 1900

Teaching Areas:
European and French History

Economic History
Nationalism
Social Theory

Recent Courses:
France in the 60s: New Wave Film and a Revolution in Culture
Western Civilization II: Europe from the Seventeenth Century to the Present
Graduate Seminar: Studies on Economic Development: Wealth, Poverty, and Crises
The Historians Craft
The French Enlightenment: Society and Letters
Western Civilization I: Prehistory to 1648
Graduate Seminar: Nationalism and the Formation of a Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France
Europe in the Seventeenth Century: Absolutism, Revolution, and Science
The Era of the French Revolution and Napoleon
Terror and Terrorism from the French Revolution to the Present 
Modern France, 1800 to the Present