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Tiffany Miller

Title

Assistant Professor of Spanish

Department

Spanish

Information

Current Courses

CRS Title Sec
GS111 Human Rights in the Global Perspective 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, Linguistic Revitalization, & Activism
  • Decolonial Theory, Ecocriticism, Medical Humanities, & Gender Studies
  • Digital Humanities and Media Studies

Personal Information

Professor Miller is a first-generation assistant professor of Spanish and the associate director of the Oak Institute for Human Rights at Colby College, where she teaches a variety of Latin American literature, film, and Spanish language courses. 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.

Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, 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. In 2017-2018 she was a Lightsey Faculty Fellow at Clemson University, where she was an assistant professor of Spanish, 2014-2020. She has also received grants and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Tinker Foundation, and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI).

Professor Miller is currently a contributing editor at the Library of Congress and the Public Relations Director of the Guatemalan Scholars Network (GSN), and she has served on the board of the Central America 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

My first book, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing: Remediating Indigenous Orality in the Digital Age, is forthcoming in spring 2022 with the University of Arizona Press. Based on fieldwork in the Guatemalan Highlands from 2010 to 2019, this book explores how Maya authors make use of multiple media (tz'ib')—specifically painting, books, and a variety of online platforms—to communicate, create, and disseminate knowledge. Drawing from the Maya conception of tz’ib' (writing not limited to Greco-Latin script) and Guatemalan Indigenous understandings of orality (tzij, ch’owen, and choloj), my book analyzes forms of mediation and representations of Maya identities in print and digital media to show how these Indigenous identities have been negotiated and reconstructed in different contemporary socio-political contexts in Guatemala: the armed conflict (1960-1996), contemporary Pan-Maya activism, and Maya diasporas in Mexico and the United States. The Maya Art of Speaking Writing examines different forms of mediation—transcription, cultural and linguistic translation, collaboration, and ethnographic field research—to show how Maya and non-Maya authors, artists, and audiences mediate and influence representations of Indigenous identities. 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 I argue that the remediated orality in the recorded media encapsulated by tz’ib’ forwards Maya orality, disseminating it beyond Guatemala’s geopolitical borders. With this remediated form of circulation, however, issues of conflicting agencies and intervention influence these artistic dynamics. The case studies in my book bring the politics and ethics of collaboration between Mayas and non-Mayas to the forefront.

Publications

  • "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 (Forthcoming).
  • "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