J. Reid Miller specializes in metaethics and the philosophy of race with a focus on structural histories of language, subjectivity, and embodiment. His areas of interdisciplinary research and teaching include structuralism/poststructuralism; 19th and early 20thC theories of race; film and literary theory; and philosophies of sexuality. His book, Stain Removal: Ethics and Race (Oxford University Press, 2016; paperback 2019), traces the parallel, historical conception of ethics and race as parasitic “stains” upon an originally value-neutral and unraced personhood. Proposing that all perception is evaluative perception, it contends that subjects originate as differentiated and recognizable through inheritances like race. Other essays on ethics, film, semiotics, and racial embodiment have appeared in journals such as Philosophy and Social Criticism, Critical Inquiry, and Diacritics.
His current book project, Immortal Transits: A Theory of Inheritance, extends his examination of inheritance as a primary yet undertheorized idiom of passage. His recent symposium essay “What Would a Philosophy of Inheritance Look Like?” in the The Journal of World Philosophies (2023) proposes the field of Inheritance Studies as a cross-disciplinary inquiry into the historically mobilizing conveyance of knowledges, qualities, and belongings that endows subjects as points of transfer. He was also a producer and writer for the award-winning documentary film 80 Years Later (2022) on Japanese American racial inheritance.
Miller received his Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, his M.A. in Media Theory and Experimental Film Production from the U of Iowa, and his B.A. in Film Theory and Psychology from Yale. He is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and a Ford Foundation Fellow. In 2018 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University and in 2022-23 a Visiting Scholar in Philosophy at UC Berkeley. Since 2021 he has served as Associate Editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.