About Me About Me | Matthew Thomas Miller
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Matthew Thomas Miller

Assistant Professor of Persian Literature and Digital Humanities at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, University of Maryland; Director, Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities (PersDig@UMD); and affiliate faculty of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) & the Religious Studies and Comparative Literature Programs

About Me About Me | Matthew Thomas Miller

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 Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Religious Studies and Comparative Literature programs. He also serves as the Director of the Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities (PersDig@UMD) 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; digital humanities; literary cultures of Middle Eastern revolutionary movements; and Orientalism/Islamophobia. He currently is working on four projects: a monograph on the role of affect/emotion in premodern Sufi epistemology and subject formation, entitled Feeling Like Lovers: Affect in Medieval Sufism (University of California Press); 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); co-editing (with Kristina Richardson) a special issue/thematic dossier, entitled “From the Margins, From Below: Theoretical and Analytical Interventions in Premodern Middle Eastern Studies” in Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā: the Journal of Middle East Medievalists (scheduled to be published 2026); and 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).

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)

Scholarly Publications

Books

  • Feeling Like Lovers: Affect in Medieval Sufism (under review at University of California Press).

Edited Volumes

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

  • (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 and Book Chapters

  • “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 The Routledge Handbook on Persian Literature, edited by Kamran Talattof, 76-120. 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.” Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022 (2022): 206–216. url: https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.15[^1]
  • “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 Benajmin 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 2019: 5th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (October 20th-21st, 2019). doi: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3352631.3352648 [^1]
  • (fourth author, with Maxim Romanov, Masoumeh Seydi, and Sarah Savant), “Open Islamicate Texts Initiative: a Machine-Readable Corpus of Texts Produced the Premodern Islamicate World.” DH2019 (Utrecht University 9-12 July 2019). doi: https://dev.clariah.nl/files/dh2019/boa/0838.html (Received the DH2019 prize for the most “innovative and interdisciplinary research”)[^1]
  • “Embodying the Sufi Beloved: (Homo)eroticism, Embodiment, and the Construction of Desire in the Hagiographic Tradition of ‘Erâqi.” 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 Ben Kiessling). “Important New Developments in Arabographic Optical Character Recognition (OCR).” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists 25 (2017). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6TZ4R.

Translations

  • God’s Wild Lovers: The Ecstatic Lyrics of Sufism’s Rogue Poets. University of California Press, Forthcoming.

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.

Works in Progress

  • Reading Classical Persian: A Comprehensive High-Frequency Introduction to Classical Persian. Book manuscript in preparation.

Public Intellectual Writing

Teaching Experience

  • 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, How to Hope: Islamic Utopian and Revolutionary Literature (Fall 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