Faculty
Stephen Miller, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
sjmiller@uab.edu
205-975-6531
Dr. Stephen Miller completed his doctorate at UCLA in 1999. Three year-long research grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Chancellor of UCLA, and the UCLA history department, as well as a Faculty Development Grant from UAB, permitted Dr. Miller to complete research for a book about eighteenth-century France and the Revolution. The book shows that positions of political authority such as seigneurial domains and venal offices were central to the wealth and status of the nobility and bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century France. This insight allows Dr. Miller to show that social forces played a critical role in the origins and unfolding of the French Revolution. Miller documents this thesis with meticulous research on the old regime province of Languedoc. His work can be seen in several articles in journals including French Historical Studies, The Journal of Social History, and European History Quarterly. The book, State and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: A Study of Political Power and Social Revolution in Languedoc, was published in 2008 . Miller's next project, for which he has received grants from the American Philosophical Society and the Faculty Development Program of UAB, analyzes the monarchy's efforts to reform its institutions by creating provincial assemblies of landowners in the 1770s and 1780s.
