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.
Monica served as Guest Curator for Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, which closed in October 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute after presenting a cultural and historical examination of Black dandyism over three centuries. The exhibition drew on her scholarly expertise to contextualize how Black communities transformed clothing into a powerful means of self-expression, organizing garments, photographs, paintings, and decorative arts into twelve thematic sections that revealed self-presentation as a mode of creative and political agency across the Atlantic diaspora.
Black Fashion & Dress Cultures
Monica's scholarship in Black fashion and dress studies investigates how sartorial choices convey narratives about identity and community through garment design, outfit assembly, and the staging of fashion presentations. Her seminal work, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, is a pioneering cultural history that traces the Black dandy from Enlightenment England to contemporary art worlds in London and New York, earning the 2010 MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize and recognition as a defining text in the field.
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.