Christopher Miller Awarded Tanner Humanities Fellowship

The Honors College is excited to announce that Assistant Professor (Lecturer) Christopher Miller was recently awarded a Tanner Humanities Fellowship to complete his monograph Public Enemies: Sound the Limits of Democracy in the American Lyric. The Fellowship gives him the opportunity to workshop his book alongside other fellows in the hopes of publishing during the next academic year.

Public Enemies examines the complex relationship between transience and lyric in American culture and policy. Miller couples a study of vagrancy laws with depictions of nomadic living in literature, cinema, and song throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Miller’s passion for the role of vagrancy laws began when he witnessed a professor detained and charged with panhandling at a protest. He began researching the laws, discovering that they are often utilized as a catch-all for transients and protesters. Public Enemies is a culmination of Miller’s study of
these laws and how they shape the role of vagrants in a democratic society.

While working with the Fellowship, Miller started a new chapter investigating the “rambling man” identity of early blues musicians. “They were being criminalized in all the ways that transients have historically been criminalized in the United States, but in ways that had a particular kind of racial character,” Miller explains. “The vagrancy codes have always been there for a very specific economic reason, which is to force people to work and to force people to work in certain kinds of jobs.”

As part of the Fellowship, Christopher Miller will give a public talk on Public Enemies at the Jewel Box in the Tanner Humanities Center on February 20 at 12 p.m. Join him to hear more about his work and contribute to his creation of Public Enemies.

McKenna Hall | Journalism Intern, University of Utah Honors College