Karen Miller

Karen Miller is Professor of History at LaGuardia Community College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her current work examines American empire and the Philippines. Her project illustrates that settler migration programs, first devised by agents of the American colonial state, not only materially dispossessed Indigenous Filipinos, but established the logics of settler entitlement that have served as an alibi for extractive political economies and their attendant inequalities. Most recently, Dr. Miller co-edited an anthology, Prehistories of the War on Terror: A Critical Genealogy with A. J. Yumi Lee, and wrote two articles which appeared in The American Quarterly: “Agents of the Settler State: Incarcerated Filipino Workers, Conjugal Migration, and Indigenous Dispossession in the American Colonial Philippines,” and “’Thin, Wistful, and White’: James Fugate and Colonial Bureaucratic Masculinity in the Philippines, 1900-1938.” Her first book, Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit (New York University Press, 2014) combined a study of racial formation and urban policy with a consideration of black activism. In 2021, she published an illustrated and abridged version of that book called How American City Leaders Built Segregated Neighborhoods while Disavowing Racism (Cambridge: MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2021). Dr. Miller’s articles and reviews have also appeared in The Journal of American History, American Historical Review, The Journal of Contemporary Sociology, The Middle West Review, The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Michigan Feminist Studies, Against the Current, and Jacobin.