Renata Kobetts Miller

Professor of English, Deputy Dean of Humanities and the Arts at City College of New York

Author, The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019)

Contact

212-650-8836

Academic Interests

Victorian literature and culture

Positions

Professor, English, City College of New York

Publications

Books

The Victorian Actress in the Novels and on the Stage.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

Recent Reinterpretations of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Why and How This Novel Continues to Affect Us. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005.

Articles

“Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Adaptations of Novels: The Paradox of Ephemerality.” Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Ed. Thomas Leitch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 53-70. Commissioned contribution. Full text available here.

“Elizabeth Robins.” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2015. Peer-reviewed, commissioned contribution (1000 words).

“Victorian Science Fiction.” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2015. Peer-reviewed, commissioned contribution (5000 words).

“1893: The Independent Theatre and the Cultural Work of Drama Crithicism.”BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. January 2013. Web. Peer-reviewed, commissioned contribution.

T. W. Robertson’s Caste. The Encyclopedia of Modern Drama. Columbia University Press, 2007.

Harley Granville-Barker’s Waste. The Encyclopedia of Modern Drama. Columbia University Press, 2007.

“Child Killers and the Competition between the Late Victorian Theater and the Novel.” MLQ 66.2 (June 2005). 197-226. (One of three finalists for the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Essay Prize for 2005.)

“The Exceptional Woman and Her Audience: Armgart, Performance, and Authorship.” The George Eliot Review (2004). 38-45.

“Imagined Audiences: The Novelist and the Stage.” The Blackwell Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Patrick Brantlinger and W. B. Thesing. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. 207-24. Commissioned contribution.

Public Scholarship

“Why I Struck.” [On International Women’s Day: “A Day Without A Woman.”] Academe Blog. 8 March 2017. https://academeblog.org/2017/03/08/why-i-struck/.

Letter to the Editor in response to David Brooks’s “Why Is Clinton Disliked?” New York Times. In print 25 May 2016, and on the Web 24 May 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/opinion/hillary-clinton-behind-the-public-persona.html?_r=0

“A Mid-Career Feminist Reflection: In An Era of Increasing Contingency and Devaluing of the Humanities, We Should Take a Moment to Reconsider the Meaning of Activism.” Academe 97 (January-February 2011), 27-29. https://www.aaup.org/article/midcareer-feminist-reflection#.WPvBybvyuu4

Op-Ed, “The Katy Perry-Elmo Dust-up is about Sexualization.” USA Today. In print and on the Web 30 September 2010. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2010-09-30-miller30_st_N.htm

“Finishing the Dissertation.” The Chronicle of Higher Education Career Network. In print and on the web 1 April 2003. http://www.chronicle.com/article/Finishing-the-Dissertation/45136/

Commissioned Book Reviews

Katherine Cockin, ed. Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011). Victorian Studies 54 (Summer 2012): 746-48.

Review essay. Reid, Julia. Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle. (New York: Palgrave, 2006). Reed, Thomas L., Jr. The Transforming Draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Victorian Alcohol Debate. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2006). Journal of Victorian Culture 13 (Autumn 2008): 334-39.

Newey, Katherine. Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Victorian Studies 49 (Winter 2007).

Allen, Emily. Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2003). Victorian Studies 46 (Spring 2004): 542-44.

Other Online Publications

“Practical Advice and Institutional Supports for the Parenting Professoriate.” Humanities Commons. Spring 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/z1zp-hf94

Slides from Renata Kobetts Miller’s (City College of New York) presentation as part of the panel on “The Problems and Possibilities of Parenting in the Academy.”

News and Reviews

I was honored to represent City College and join a great group of scholars in “Humanities in Five” at the 2019 Modern Language Association convention to promote the value of humanities hashtagresearch. The challenge: present your research in 5 minutes to a non-academic audience, no podium, no notes, with local Chicago journalists judging. My discussion of my recently released book The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage appears at 48:19 in the full video on the MLA site: https://lnkd.in/exdADBW.hashtappears at 48:19 in the full video on the MLA site: https://lnkd.in/exdADBW.

CUNY SUM on my book The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage:

https://sum.cuny.edu/the-actress-influence-on-victorian-writing/

Photos of my November 19, 2018, book talk at the on The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage, at the Rifkind Center at the City College of New York, appear here: https://rifkindcenter.org/renata-miller-talk

syllabi and teaching materials

“Syllabus for Melodrama, with assignments.” Humanities Commons. Spring 2019. 
http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/89ac-5w53

This is a syllabus for Renata Kobetts Miller’s capstone research course on Melodrama at the City College of New York in Spring 2019. It is built on the Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama, edited by Carolyn Williams (2018). The syllabus includes the final assignment sequence for scaffolded research.

“Eight Steps to Better Paragraphing and a Clearer Essay.” Humanities Commons. Spring 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/gxdk-nw46

I designed this workshop on paragraphing and essay structure many years ago. I use it regularly in my undergraduate literature courses at the City College of New York as an in-class activity that students conduct on their own first drafts.