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Tiffany Miller

Title

Assistant Professor of Spanish

Department

Spanish & Latin American Studies

Information

Office Hours

Tuesday 1-2pm; Friday 2-4pm

Current Courses

CRS Title Sec
SP125 Elementary Spanish I C
SP343 Indigenous Textualities, Decoloniality, and Land Sovereignty A

Education

  • Ph.D., University of Kansas, 2014
  • M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007
  • B.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005

Areas of Expertise

  • Contemporary Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies, emphasis on Central America & Mexico
  • Maya Literatures, Textualities, Orality, & Performance
  • Indigenous Sovereignty, Human Rights, Linguistic Revitalization, & Activism
  • Decolonial Theory, Ecocriticism, Medical Humanities, & Gender Studies
  • Digital Humanities, Indigenous Film & Media Studies

Personal Information

Professor Miller is a first-generation assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Colby College, where she teaches a variety of Latin American literature, film, and Spanish language courses. Given her research and teaching on Indigenous sovereignty and rights, she also serves as the director of the Oak Institute for Human Rights. Working across Hispanic and K’ichean (Kaqchikel, K’iche’, and Tz’utujil Maya) literary and cultural traditions, her research and teaching focus on contemporary Indigenous studies and decolonial critical theory, with an emphasis on orality, performance, new media, and linguistic revitalization initiatives.

As an Indigenous Media Studies scholar, Miller is currently the co-PI on an 18-month grant in collaboration with CU-Boulder, Marquette University, and Konstanz University in Germany for $75K on a research project on Indigenous film and land sovereignty, titled “Global Indigeneity and Land Struggle: Documentary Film for Sustainable Futures.” Before joining the Colby faculty, in 2017-2018 she was a Lightsey Faculty Fellow at Clemson University, where she was an assistant professor of Spanish, 2014-2020. Her published work has appeared in the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Hispanic Studies Review, Label Me Latina/o, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and the MLA Teaching Series, among others.

Professor Miller is currently a contributing editor at the Library of Congress, Conference Co-Chair of the Guatemalan Scholars Network (GSN), and the Secretary of the Ethnicity, Race, and Indigenous Peoples (ERIP) Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Beyond academia, she actively promotes Kaqchikel language revitalization initiatives, and she is an advisor for Wuqu’ Kawoq: Maya Health Alliance, a medical NGO that provides health care and promotes Indigenous language rights and literacy in Guatemala. Given her experiences with global health in Indigenous Guatemala, Dr. Miller is a regular contributor for Synapsis, an online medical humanities journal organized by Columbia University.

Current Research

Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in the Guatemalan Highlands (2010-2019), Miller published her first book, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing: Remediating Indigenous Orality in the Digital Age (University of Arizona Press, 2022). Challenging the distinctions between “old” and “new” media and narratives about the deprecation of orality in favor of inscribed forms, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing draws from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages. Miller argues that Maya authors, artists, and their audiences remediate forms of Maya orality by reworking and distributing them through recorded media, such as the street murals, testimonios, poetry, online videos, and ethnographic recordings analyzed in this book. Through these various examples, the remediated orality in the recorded media encapsulated by tz’ib’ forwards Maya orality, disseminating it beyond Guatemala’s geopolitical borders. Methodologically, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing calls for centering Indigenous epistemologies by doing research in and through Indigenous languages as we engage in debates surrounding Indigenous literatures, anthropology, decoloniality, media studies, orality, and the digital humanities.

In addition to FLAS (Foreign Language Area Studies) fellowships to study Kaqchikel Maya from Tulane University and KU (2010-2011), the research for Miller’s first book was supported by the Tinker Foundation (2010), the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), as well as internal grants at Colby and Clemson. The book’s theoretical framework on orality and performance in relation to digital media was informed by participation in an NEH Summer Institute on Digital Technologies in Theatre and Performance Studies (2018).

Miller’s current book project focuses on street art and graffiti in Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. Using a feminist, ecocritical approach, she analyzes this art as public tools of present-day cultural and linguistic preservation. Through visual media, the street and graffiti artists push for Indigenous survivance with an eye toward a plurality of Maya futurities on their own terms. She is also working on a second book project that analyzes representations of Kaqchikel spirituality and the four cardinal points across media formats and genres of contemporary cultural production. In addition to these single-authored monographs in progress, Miller is also co-editing an edited volume that explores the theme of reciprocity in contemporary Kaqchikel Maya cultural production (under advanced contract with Amherst College Press), and she is collaborating with Kaqchikel social scientist, poet, and ajq’ij (daykeeper) — Kawoq Baldomero Cuma Chávez — to translate a book-length collection of poetry by Cuma Chávez from Kaqchikel into Spanish and English.

Selected Publications

Books

Single-Authored Monographs

  • The Maya Art of Speaking Writing: Remediating Indigenous Orality in the Digital Age. University of Arizona Press, 2022.
  • Maya Activist Ecologies: Cultural Survivance and Land Sovereignty in Street Art and Graffiti in Lake Atitlán. In progress.
  • Decolonial Transnational Ch’owen: Invoking Guatemalan Highland Spirituality and Environmental Indigenous Futurisms. In progress.

Other Book Projects

  • Miller, Tiffany D. Creegan and Joyce N. Bennett, eds. Kemtzij: Weaving Reciprocal Indigenous Ontologies in Kaqchikel Maya Arts. Under Advance Contract, Amherst College Press.
  • Qak’aslem Maya’ chupam ri Pach’ün Tzij / Nuestra Vida en la Poesía Maya / Our Lives in Maya Poetry, Poetry by Kawoq Baldomero Cuma Chávez, Trilingual Translation (Kaqchikel Maya, Spanish, English) by Tiffany D. Creegan Miller. In Progress.

Articles and Book Chapters

  • ”Decolonial Ch’owen Across Abiayala and Turtle Island: Calixta Gabriel Xiquín’s Poetic Invocations of Kaqchikel Spirituality, the Cardinal Points, and Trans-Indigenous Grandmothers.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 34, no. 3-4, Fall-Winter 2022, pp. 50-76.
  • ”Queering Abiayala: Personal and Political Cartographies of the Indigenous Americas.” Performances that Change the Americas, edited by Stuart A. Day. Routledge, Sept. 2021, pp. 99-115. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies.
  • “‘Kixinto’, k’u xa jub’iq’ (‘I give, but just a little’): Negotiating K’iche’ Orality, Self-Translation, and Cultural Agency in “Xalolilo lelele’” by Humberto Ak’abal.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 54, no. 3, Oct. 2020, pp. 653-77.
  • “Ri pach’un tzij aj Iximulew: Teaching Contemporary Maya Poetries from Guatemala.” Teaching Modern Latin American Poetries, edited by Jill S. Kuhnheim and Melanie Nicholson, MLA, Nov. 2019, pp. 278-91. MLA Series Options for Teaching.
  • “Performing Transnational Maya Experiences in Florida and San Juan Chamula in Workers in the Other World by Sna Jtz’ibajom and Robert M. Laughlin.” Hispanic Studies Review, vol. 3, no. 1, 2018, pp. 46-62.
  • “Una sociedad fragmentada: la heterogeneidad maya durante el conflicto armado guatemalteco y la violencia “posguerra” en Insensatez (2004) de Horacio Castellanos Moya.” El diablo en el espejo: reflexiones críticas sobre la obra de Horacio Castellanos Moya, edited by María del Carmen Caña Jiménez and Vinodh Venkatesh, Ediciones Eón, 2016, pp. 99-118.
  • ”Xib’e pa el Norte”: Ethnographic Encounters with Kaqchikel Maya Migration to New York near Lake Atitlán, Guatemala.” Label Me Latina/o, vol. 5, 2015, pp. 1-17.
  • “Conjuros y ebriedades: (Re)negotiating Global Politics of Ethnicity and Autochthonous Production in the Mayan Highlands of Chiapas.” The Boom Femenino in Mexico: Contemporary Women’s Writing. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, pp. 166-84.

Other Publications