Kiri Miller is Professor of American Studies at Brown. Her work focuses on participatory culture, interactive digital media, popular music, and virtual/visceral performance practices. Her current research project investigates "insomniac listening" via sleepcasts and meditation apps: app-based audio content that promises to put listeners to sleep. Building on her previous work on "intimate media," Miller analyzes how these audiocentric self-care products circulate across platforms and drive discourse about anxiety, wellness, and sonic comfort.
Miller's most recent book, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media (Oxford, 2017), shows 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 is also the author of 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 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. In 2010-11 she held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the American Council of Learned Societies. Miller's regular course offerings include Musical Youth Cultures, Making Music American, Virtual Bodies, Music and Technoculture, and Popular Music Studies.
