Ian M. Miller

Ian M. Miller has been teaching at St. John’s since 2015, when he received his PhD from Harvard University. He teaches courses on East Asia, environmental history, and world history. His research interests are in the long-term interplay between changing ideas, changing institutions, and changing environments, especially in southern and central China, and in the use of digital texts and tools to explore new methods for writing history. Ian is the author of Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2020) and co-editor of The Cultivated Forest: People and Woodlands in Asian History (University of Washington Press, 2022). He has received fellowships from the Center for Agrarian Studies at Yale University, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Ian’s current project is a history of the connections between family institutions and village environments, tentatively titled Ancestral Shade: Kinship and Ecology in Southern China.