Kiri Miller is Professor of American Studies at Brown University. Her work focuses on interactive digital media, popular culture, and virtual/visceral performance practices. Her current research project investigates "tell-spotting" as an increasingly prevalent mode of media engagement and public discourse, wherein humans aim to demonstrate their capacity to identify AI-generated content. Meanwhile, LLMs and other interactive algorithmic technologies are designed to spot, verify, and sometimes mimic the "tells" of human users.
In another recent project, Miller explored contemporary practices of "insomniac listening," focusing on app-based audio content that promises to put listeners to sleep. Building on her previous work on "intimate media," Miller analyzed how these audiocentric self-care products circulate across platforms and drive discourse about anxiety, wellness, and sonic comfort. This research was published in the article "Switching Off with Sleepcasts: Insomniac Listening and Sonic Self-Care" in American Quarterly (2024).
Miller is the author of three books. Most recently, in Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media (Oxford, 2017), she showed how dance video games transmit choreography, teach "kinesthetic listening", invite experimentation with gendered and racialized movement, and stage domestic surveillance as intimate recognition. Playable Bodies was the recipient of the de la Torre Bueno Book Award from the Dance Studies Association and the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. Miller's previous monographs are Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (Oxford, 2012) and Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (Illinois, 2008).
Miller completed the Ph.D. in Music (Ethnomusicology) at Harvard in 2005 and was a Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta before joining the Brown faculty in 2007. She has published articles in American Quarterly, Ethnomusicology, New Media & Society, Game Studies, American Music, 19th-Century Music, the Journal of American Folklore, Oral Tradition, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the American Council of Learned Societies. Miller's regular course offerings include Virtual Bodies, Musical Youth Cultures, Sounding Out America, Popular Music Studies, and a graduate-level introductory seminar in American Studies.
