Monica L. Miller is Chair and Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York City
Monica is a scholar of contemporary African American and Afrodiasporic literature and cultural studies, and is a frequent commentator in the media and arts worlds. She writes and teaches about Black literature, art, and performance; fashion cultures; and, contemporary Black European culture.
Black European & Afro-Swedish Studies
Monica’s work in Black European and Afro-Swedish cultural studies uses critical race theories grounded in Black European experiences to examine the emplacement of Black people in Europe, the cultures they are trying to make or remake, and the diasporic identities they are forging.
African American & Afro-Diasporic Studies
Trained as a literary scholar and cultural historian of African American and Afro-diasporic literature and culture, Monica has written about and taught writers and artists as diverse as Olaudah Equiano and Toni Morrison, Theaster Gates and Isaac Julien.
Black Fashion & Dress Cultures
Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity
Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. The book received the 2010 William Sanders Scarborough Prize for the best book in African American literature and culture from the Modern Language Association (MLA) and was shortlisted for the 2010 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.