Hillary Miller

Hillary Miller teaches twentieth and twenty-first century drama in the English Department at Queens College (CUNY) and serves as Assistant Director of the English MA program. Her first book, Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York [nupress.northwestern.edu] (Northwestern University Press, 2016), won the John W. Frick Book Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society and the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research. Her second book, Playwrights on Television: Conversations with Dramatists [routledge.com] (Routledge, 2020), addresses the labor of the contemporary playwright through interviews with eighteen dramatic writers about their cross-platform writing careers. She has published on numerous topics related to theatre post-World War II in the United States, including: activist theatre traditions; performance and urban space; racial, ethnic, and geographic inequalities in the arts; and the politics of producing. 

Her essays and reviews have appeared in Lateral, PAJ, Performance Research, The Radical History Review, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Survey. Recent book chapters include, “Marching Off-Beat and On Screen: New York’s Reform Movements & Charles Hale Hoyt’s A Milk White Flag” in Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage, 1890-1920, eds. J. Christopher Westgate and Max Shulman (University of Iowa Press, 2019), “Television as Theatre Text in the Austere Academy: A Curricular Exploration” in Theatre and Performance in the Neoliberal University: Responses to an Academy in Crisis, ed. Kim Solga (Routledge, 2020) and “Vinnette Carroll, Langston Hughes, and the Creation of the Gospel Song-Play” in The Great North American Stage Directors, Vol. 4 [bloomsbury.com], eds. Chase Bringardner and Henry Bial (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2021). She currently serves as Editorial Committee co-leader for the American Theatre and Drama Society. 

She received her Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance from the Graduate Center (City University of New York), an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and a B.A. in Theatre and Women’s Studies from Dartmouth College. She has taught at Baruch College (CUNY), California State University-Northridge, and Stanford University.