Dr Nathaniel Miller
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
nm629@cam.ac.uk
Nathaniel Miller is from Rhode Island and has a BA (St. Olaf, 2002) and an MA (Indiana, 2005) in English Literature. After deciding that he did not need to write a dissertation on William Blake, however much he loved him, he moved to Egypt, where he lived in Cairo and Alexandria from 2007 to 2010, studying Arabic from 2009 to 2010 as a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo. He returned to the US where he completed his PhD in Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Chicago (2016). His dissertation was on tribal identity in Ashʿār al-Hudhaliyyīn (Poems of the Hudhayl tribe), the only surviving medieval Arabic anthology of a single tribe's poetry, attributed to poets living near Mecca from ca. 550 to 750 CE. In addition to the Hudhalīs, his favorite classical Arabic poets are Ibn Khafāja, al-Maʿarrī and Ibn al-Fāriḍ.
Teaching responsibilities:
Dr Miller teaches advanced literary Arabic
Pre- and early Islamic Arabic poetry
medieval Arabic poetry anthologies
the Qurʾān
Poetics of Sunnism: Arabic Literary Networks in the Crusades-Era Mediterranean
Tribal Poetry in Early Arabic Culture: The Case of Ashʿār al-Hudhaliyyīn
Articles, Book Chapters etc
Seasonal Poetics: The Dry Season and Autumn Rains among Pre-Islamic Najdī and Ḥijāzī Tribes Arabica 64:1 pp. 1-27 (2017)
Warrior Elites on the Verge of Islam: Between Court and Tribe in Arabic Poetry Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila (ed.) & Ilkka Lindstedt (ed.) & Saana Svärd (ed.) Cross-Cultural Studies in Near Eastern History and Literature (Vol. 2 of The Intellectual Heritage of the Ancient and Mediaeval Near East) pp. 137-173 (2016)
Undergraduate courses taught
MES.34 Advanced Literary Arabic