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 Persian literature; Sufism; the history of affect/emotion in the Islamicate world; digital humanities; literary cultures of Middle Eastern revolutionary movements. 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
- 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 Project (Role: 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)
- $282,905 Level III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora: Improving Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script Manuscripts Project (Role: Principal Investigator) (2020)
- HathiTrust Research Center Advanced Collaborative Support Award for Detecting and Transcribing Arabographic Texts Project (Role: Co-Principal Investigator) (2020)
- 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” (2020)
- $800,000 grant from The Mellon Foundation for Phase I of The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP) (Role: Principal Investigator) (2019)
- $19,584 grant from JSTOR to conduct OCR study on al-Abhath Arabic journal (2018)
- Ehsan Yarshater Fellowship in Iranian and Persian Studies, Yale University (2017-2019) (declined)
- £5,000 Collection Care and Emergency Response Grant, 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)
- $15,000 Global Classroom Initiatives Grant for development of the Islamicate World 2.0: Studying Islamicate Cultures through Computation Textual Analysis course (2015) (Role: Principal Investigator)
- 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)
Books
- Feeling Like Lovers: Affect in Medieval Sufism. Under review with University of California Press.
Edited Volumes
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(with Domenico Ingenito). Medieval and Early Modern Persian Poetry: Welcoming New Directions and Forgotten Geographies. Under contract with Edinburgh University Press.
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(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^[Conference proceedings in the field of computer science are considered to be as prestigious as journal articles in most cases.]
- “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.
Works in Progress
- “Effecting ‘Great Things in the Order of the World’: The Æffectation of Ghaznavid Power in Farrukhī’s Qasidah on the Sacking of the Somnath Temple.” (Journal article in preparation for special issue/thematic dossier, entitled “From the Margins, From Below: Theoretical and Analytical Interventions in Premodern Middle Eastern Studies,” of Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā).
- “In the Winehouse with Our Fellow Rascals”: The Poetics, Textual Transmission, and Reception of Fakhr al-Din ʿIraqi’s Cupbearer Ode (Sāqī-Nāmah) (Book chapter in preparation for Medieval and Early Modern Persian Poetry: Welcoming New Directions and Forgotten Geographies).
- “The Ethics of Digitization, or How to Avoid Digital Colonialism” (journal article in preparation).
- Reading Classical Persian: A Comprehensive High-Frequency Introduction to Classical Persian. Book manuscript in preparation.
Public Scholarship
- “OpenITI and Digital Philology in South Asia.” OpenITI Blog, forthcoming.
- “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:http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6KF99.
Areas of Teaching and Reserarch Interests
Primary Areas of Interest: Sufism; Persian literature of all periods; (global) digital humanities; literature of revolutionary movements in the Middle East; Orientalism; literary and cultural theory (especially, gender & sexuality studies, affect theory, history of emotions, sensory history, cognitive literary theory, and translation studies)
Secondary Areas of Interest: Arabic literature of all periods; contemporary Islamic political thought
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 University
- Founding Member, University of Maryland Chapter of American Association of University Professors (UMD AAUP) (Spring 2021-now)
- Member, UMD IT Council - Research Technologies Working Group, 2024-now.
- Member, Race, Equity, and Social Justice Committee, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (Fall 2020—Spring 2021)
- Member, Search Committee for “Roshan Lecturer in Persian Studies” (Spring 2020)
- Director, Afghan Refugee Accompaniment Program (Fall 2017-Spring 2020)
- Member, University-wide Super Computing Committee (Fall 2017-Spring 2018)
- Member, advisory board for the joint College of Arts and Humanities/Maryland Institute for Technology and Humanities Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities (DSAH) (2016-Now)
- Member, Roshan Institute Scholarships Review Committee (2016-Now)
- Member, Global Classrooms Evaluation Committee (2017)
Service to Profession
- 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)