Research & Teaching Interests:
Environmental history, agricultural history, and economic history; science communication and the history of science; farms, forests, soils, and society; place-based pedagogy, soil science education, and sustainable agriculture education; ethnohistory, oral history, and agricultural ethnography; labor, political economy, political ecology, and social movements; sense of place, community development, and bioregionalism; commons systems and cooperation science; Appalachia, the American South, New England, and the United States
Education:
- Ph.D. Environmental History, University of Maine, Orono, ME
- M.S. Candidate, Soil Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
- Graduate Certificate Candidate, Sustainable Agriculture, Washington State University, Pullman, WA
- M.A. Appalachian Studies and Sustainability, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC
- M.A. American History, University of Maine, Orono, ME
- B.A. History (minor in American Indian Studies), Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA
Teaching:
- SD 2400 Principles of Sustainable Development
- SD 3535 Social Movements and Sustainable Development
- SD 3541 Agricultural Humanities and our Agrarian Future
- SD 3600 Environmental Humanities
Background:
I strive to be an interdisciplinary teacher-scholar and focus on the relationships between agroecological change, social change, and collective action throughout time and space. Place is central to my work and I am especially committed to the agroecosystems, communities, foodways, and landscapes of Appalachia and the American South. Much of my research is positioned within questions of what Appalachia and the American South were, are, and can be. My current book project explores the agro-environmental history, ethnopedology, and community understandings of soil conservation in twentieth-century Appalachia. Through the region’s soils, I seek to understand the relationship between soil conservation and landscape change. Additionally, I explore how agroecological knowledge was and continues to be produced, disseminated, and contested in Appalachia. I am also co-developing place-based teaching modules that use the Sustainable Development Teaching and Research Farm and campus gardens as dynamic opportunities to critically examine sense of place and integrate environmental humanities, social science, soil science, and agroecology. Ultimately, these modules create applied opportunities for students to position dynamic, local landscapes within conversations about regional, national, and international sustainable development.
Representative Publications:
Miller, C. 2023. "Soils as Archives: Cultivating an Integrative Pedagogy for Soil History and Place-Based Education in Appalachia,” Agricultural History 97, no. 4 (November): 649-655.
Miller, C. 2018. "Sowing Seeds and Reclaiming the Commons: Possibilities and Pathways for the Future of Appalachian Agricultural History," Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 116, no. 3/4 (Summer/Autumn): 443-556.
Miller, C. 2015. “The Farmer’s Family Must Find Compensation in Something Less Tangible, Less Material”: Culture and Agriculture in Maine and New England, 1870-1905,” Maine History 49, no. 2 (Summer): 150-175.
Title: Senior Lecturer
Department: Sustainable Development
Email address: Email me
Phone: (828) 262-8983