Profile: Shannon Miller

Shannon Miller

Shannon Miller, Chair
Department of English and Comparative Literature

Where were you before coming to SJSU?

I came to San José State University from Temple University in Philadelphia, where I taught for 21 years and served as the department chair for six of those years. Like San José State, Temple is an urban university, a “state supported” institution (though that really just means very little state support). This was my second job, as I started my teaching career at a small school in Michigan, Albion College, where I taught for two years, and I also spent a year at the University of Utah on a fellowship that had some teaching responsibilities.

Tell us something about your personal life, such as your family or your interests outside of work.

My husband and I are both from the Bay Area—I grew up in Marin and he grew up in a small town in Contra Costa County. Both of us are excited to be back in the region, and we are hoping that we can find time for some more hiking, camping in our Westfalia camper van along the North and Central Coasts, and doing some kayaking in the bay.

Why are you excited to be here?

I’m particularly looking forward to working with the faculty in my department and the students at San José State, who seem very committed to the institution and excited to begin or continue their education here. Having the campus located right in the middle of San José is particularly appealing, and I am hoping that the English department can continue to extend points of connection to employers and other arts agencies in the city and the region. This seems a great time to be joining San José State University as the California economy is recovering, and the state is making some needed investment into the CSU.

What is your educational background?

I attended school back East—I received my BA from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and then received my MA and PhD from UC Santa Barbara, places that are about as climatically distinct as two places can be in the continental US. My undergraduate major was in English, and my field of specialization is Renaissance Literature and Culture. I work on and teach sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literary and historical texts as well as some Continental materials, and I have a particular interest in women writers in the Medieval through Renaissance periods.

What do you enjoy about teaching?

My favorite aspect of teaching is giving students the skills to undertake the learning process on their own, whether that is giving them the skills to tackle early modern/Renaissance poetry and prose, or helping them to define and successfully carry out their own research projects. One of the greatest, if also a little bittersweet, moments in teaching is when the students take over the classroom themselves, showing that they actually don’t need your input—when they are working collectively as a group to improve their own projects.

What do you enjoy about being a specialist in your field?

I have enjoyed asking new questions of 400-year-old texts to reveal new aspects about them to students and fellow scholars alike. My recent work on John Milton’s Paradise Lost and women writers of the seventeenth century posed a question no one had asked:  What kind of possible cross-overs were there between this epic poem, viewed by many readers as misogynistic, and women publishing in the century during which Paradise Lost was published? What kind of influences might have flown in either direction? The effect of asking this question opened up the poem in new ways, particularly around the issues of the representation of gender, and altered our views of both these women writers and of Milton’s poetry.

Please give us a quote that sums up your personal, educational, creative, or scholarly philosophy.

There are two:

“The likelihood of one individual being right increases in direct proportion to the intensity with which others are trying to prove him wrong.”
—Mr. Jordon in Heaven Can Wait (1978)

“But when she saw them gone, she forward went,
As lay her Journey, thro that perilous Pace,
With stedfast Courage and stout Hardiment;
Ne evil thing she fear’d, ne evil thing she meant.”
—Description of Britomart, Martial Maid, in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 3 (1590)

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