About Me

Brief Bio

Matthew Thomas Miller is Assistant Professor of Persian Literature and Digital Humanities at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and affiliate faculty of the Religious Studies and Comparative Literature programs and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. He also serves as the Director of the Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities (PersDig@UMD) and the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Persian Digital Library (EOMPDL), and as the co-PI for the multi-institutional Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) and the Persian Manuscript Initiative (PMI). He has received generous funding for these projects from The Mellon Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Science Foundation and The Islamic Manuscript Association. His research focuses on Sufism; the history of sexuality, the body, sense, and affect/emotion; the literary and political writings of twentieth-century Iranian revolutionaries; and digital humanities.

His first book, Feeling Like Lovers: Affect in Medieval Sufism (University of California, 2026), explores the central role of affect, emotion, and feeling in premodern Sufi epistemology and subject formation. He is also working on an edited volume of studies of premodern Persian literature (with Domenico Ingenito), entitled Medieval and Early Modern Persian Poetry: Welcoming New Directions and Forgotten Geographies (Edinburgh University Press); a book of translations of the (in)famous “rogue lyrics” (qalandariyyāt) of Sanāʾī, ʿAṭṭār, and ʿIrāqī, entitled God’s Wild Lovers: The Ecstatic Lyrics of Sufism’s Rogue Poets (University of California Press); and a new project on the utopian writings of twentieth-century Iranian revolutionary writers. He also is a passionate activist for academic labor and works closely with UMD’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the United Academics of Maryland-UMD (UAM-UMD), and the national AAUP to help improve higher education in Maryland and beyond.

Education

2016—PhD, Comparative Literature (with Graduate Certificate, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), Washington University in Saint Louis
2009—MA, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies, Washington University in Saint Louis
2007—BA, International and Area Studies (with University Honors and Phi Beta Kappa), Washington University in Saint Louis

Honors, Awards, and Grants (Selected)

• $1,800,000 grant and endowment gift from the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute for the establishment of the Dr. Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Persian Digital Library (EOMPDL) (Role: Director) (2025)
• Honored by the University of Maryland at the Maryland Research Excellence Celebration for “demonstrably elevat[ing] the visibility and reputation of the University of Maryland Research Enterprise” (2023)
• $1,750,000 grant from The Mellon Foundation for Phase II of The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP) (Role: Principal Investigator) (2022)
• $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the “Unsupervised Islamicate Manuscript Transcription via Lacunae Reconstruction” (Role: Co-Principal Investigator, split with collaborators at University of California, San Diego’s Berg Lab) (2022)
• $10,000 Independent Scholarship, Research and Creativity Award (ISRCA) (Spring Semester 2022 teaching release)
• $100,000 grant from The Mellon Foundation for bridge funding phase of “The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP)” (Role: Principal Investigator) (2021)
• Level III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant ($282,905) from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the project entitled, “Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora: Improving Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script Manuscripts” (Role: Principal Investigator) (2020).
• HathiTrust Research Center Advanced Collaborative Support Award for “Detecting and Transcribing Arabographic Texts” (Role: Co-Principal Investigator) (2020)
• Grant ($800,000) from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for “The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP)” (Role: Principal Investigator) (2019)
• Ehsan Yarshater Fellowship in Iranian and Persian Studies, Yale University (2017-2019) (declined)
• Collection Care and Emergency Response Grant (£5,000), Islamic Manuscript Association (2017) (for PMI project in the Raja of Mahmudabad Palace Library) (Role: Principal Investigator)
• DRIF Conference Grant for “Manuscripts in the 21st Century” workshop (2016)
• Global Classroom Initiatives Grant (2015) for development of the Islamicate World 2.0: Studying Islamicate Cultures through Computation Textual Analysis course ($12,000). More information on the course is available here (Role: Principal Investigator)
• Tier 1 University of Maryland Grant (2015) for Persian Digital Library project ($50,000)
• Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute Fellowship for Excellence in Persian Studies (2012-2013)
• Mellon-Sawyer Graduate Fellowship (2011-2012)
• Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society (Spring 2007)

Scholarly Publications

Books

• Feeling Like Lovers: Affect in Medieval Sufism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (2026).

Edited Volumes

• (with Domenico Ingenito). Medieval and Early Modern Persian Poetry: Welcoming New Directions and Forgotten Geographies. Under contract with Edinburgh University Press.

• (with Kristina Richardson). A special issue/thematic dossier, entitled “From the Margins, From Below: Theoretical and Analytical Interventions in Premodern Middle Eastern Studies.” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā: the Journal of Middle East Medievalists (scheduled to be published 2026).

Journal Articles, Book Chapters, & Conference Proceedings

• (with John Mullan, David Smith, Jonathan Allen, Lorenz Nigst, Taimoor Shahid Khan, Mathew Barber, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Osama Eshera, and Sarah Bowen Savant). “AI-Cat: An Artificial Intelligence-augmented Cataloging Tool and Workflow.” Submitted to Digital Humanities Quarterly in August 2025.
• (with Jonathan Allen, John Mullan, David Smith, Lorenz Nigst, Mathew Barber, Taimoor Shahid Khan, Masoumeh Seydi, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Nikolai Vogler, Osama Eshera, and Sarah Bowen Savant). “OpenITI MAKHZAN: An Open Annotated Dataset of Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu Print and Manuscript Data.” Submitted to Journal of Open Humanities Data in April 2025.
• “Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī: Poet, Mystic, ‘Ocean of the Persians’.” In Mystical Landscapes: Voices and Themes in Medieval Persian Literature, edited by Fatemeh Keshavarz and Ahmet T. Karamustafa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025.
• (fourth author, with David A. Smith, Jacob Murel, and Jonathan Parkes Allen). “Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora: Commonly Copied Texts as Distant Supervision for Handwritten Text Recognition.” In Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2023, Paris, France, December 6-8, 2023, edited by Artjoms Sela, Fotis Jannidis, and Iza Romanowska, 3558:206–21. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, 2023. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3558/paper1708.pdf.
• “Genre in Classical Persian Poetry.” In Routledge Handbook of Ancient, Classical and Late Classical Persian Literature, edited by Kamran Talattof, 77-104. New York: Routledge, 2023.
• (third author, with Nikolai Vogler, Jonathan Allen, and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick). “Lacuna Reconstruction: Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Low-Resource Historical Document Transcription.” In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, edited by Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, and Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz, 206–16. Seattle, United States: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.15.
• “The Poetics of the Sufi Carnival: The Rogue Lyrics (Qalandariyyāt) as Heterotopic Countergenre(s).” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists 30 (2022): 1-46. url: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alusur/article/view/uw30mmiller.
• “The Qalandar King: Early Development of the Qalandariyyāt and Saljuq Conceptions of Kingship in Amir Moʿezzi’s Panegyric for Sharafshāh Jaʿfari.” Iranian Studies 55:2 (2022): 521-549. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2021.8.
• (with Benjamin Kiessling, Gennady Kurin, and Kader Smail). “Advances and Limitations in Open Source Arabic-Script OCR: A Case Study,” Digital Studies / Le champ numérique 11:1 (2021). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.8094.
• (third author, with Benjamin Kiessling and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra). “BADAM: A Public Dataset for Baseline Detection in Arabic-script Manuscripts.” HIP ‘19: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing, September 2019. Pages 13–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3352631.3352648.
• (fourth author, with Maxim Romanov, Masoumeh Seydi, and Sarah Savant). “Open Islamicate Texts Initiative: a Machine-Readable Corpus of Texts Produced in the Premodern Islamicate World.” DH2019 (Utrecht University 9-12 July 2019). doi: https://doi.org/10.34894/B3GLLK (Received the DH2019 prize for the most “innovative and interdisciplinary research”).
• “Embodying the Beloved: (Homo)eroticism, Embodiment, and the Construction of Desire in the Hagiographic Tradition of ʿIrāqī.” Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures 21:1 (2018): 1-27. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2018.1492134.
• (with Bridget Almas, Emad Khazraee, and Joshua Westgard). “Manuscript Study in Digital Spaces: The State of the Field and New Ways Forward.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 12/2 (2018). doi: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/12/2/000374/000374.html.
• (with Maxim G. Romanov, Sarah Bowen Savant, and Benjamin Kiessling). “Important New Developments in Arabographic Optical Character Recognition (OCR).” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists 25 (2017): 1-13. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6TZ4R.

Translations

• God’s Wild Lovers: The Ecstatic Lyrics of Sufism’s Rogue Poets. Under contract with University of California Press.

White Papers

• (with Jonathan Parkes Allen, John Mullan, and David Smith). “Digitizing the Islamicate Written Traditions: History, State of the Field, and Best Practices for Open-source Arabic-script OCR.” White paper for the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst project, Phase I (2022). https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NJOB3rBBEowzwOzyggi479rv9ydQ2JL7syyuyi_x9Qw/edit?usp=sharing

Invited Contributions

• (with Jake Benson, Ali Khan Mahmudabad, and Columba Stewart). “The Raja of Mahmudabad Palace Library Project.” Shi’i Studies Review 3 (2019): 271-279. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/ap4q-zw79.
• (with Maxim G. Romanov and Sarah Bowen Savant). “Digitizing the Textual Heritage of the Premodern Islamicate World: Principles and Plans.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50 (2017): 103-109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743817000964.
• (with Sarah Bowen Savant). “‘Tell Me Something I Don’t Know!’: The Place and Politics of Digital Methods in the (Islamicate) Humanities.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50 (2017): 135-139. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743817001027.

Public Intellectual Writing

• “Sufi love poetry is in vogue, but few grasp its radical meaning.” Aeon Psyche, October 13th, 2021. url: https://psyche.co/ideas/sufi-love-poetry-is-in-vogue-but-few-grasp-its-radical-meaning
• “The Kite Runner Critiqued: New Orientalism Goes to the Big Screen.” CommonDreams (Jan 2008). Available for download here. Translated into Persian: “Ravâyati neo-orientâlisti az khâvarmiyâneh: naqdi digar bar ‘Bâdbâdak-bâz’.” Jahân-e Ketâb sâl-e sizdahom, shomâreh-ye 3 va 4 (Khordâd va Tir 1387). Translated by Ahmad Sayf. Available here.

Teaching Experience

• Instructor, Modern Iran (Spring 2026)
• Instructor, Sufism: History, Literature, and Politics of Islamic Mysticism (Fall 2024)
• Instructor, Introduction to Persian Literature in Translation (Spring 2015, Fall 2017, Spring 2025)
• Instructor, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Islamic World (Spring 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2022, Spring 2024, Fall 2025)
• Instructor, Iranian Cinema (Fall 2019, Fall 2020)
• Instructor, Lyrics of Mystical Love: Rumi, Song of Songs, and St. Teresa of Avila to Mirabai and Manhae (Spring 2019, 2014)
• Instructor, Sex, Love, and Desire in Persian Poetry (Spring 2018)
• Instructor, The Islamicate World 2.0: Studying Islamic Cultures through Computational Textual Analysis (Fall 2016, Spring 2021).
• Instructor, Introduction to Global Digital Humanities (Spring 2016)
• Instructor, Lyrics of Mystical Love, East and West (Fall 2014)
• Instructor, Words and Worlds: A Critical Literacy Approach to Reading and Writing (4/2014-7/2014)

Service to Profession

• Peer Reviewer for Iranian Studies
• Member, Alpheios Advisory Board
• Member, Board of Islamicate Digital Humanities Network
• Member, vHMML Board of Advisors, Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML)
• Former Member, ALTO (Analyzed Layout and Text Object) International Editorial Board for OCR standards
• Served on two National Endowment for the Humanities grant review panels
• Institutional Trustee, Board of Trustees, American Institute of Afghanistan Studies (AIAS)