Jason Miller

Dr. Jason Miller’s research interests include 20th-century American Poetry, American Literature, literary theory, and pedagogy. He serves the department as Professor of Literature where he currently teaches a graduate seminar entitled "Langston Hughes: From Popular Culture to the Civil Rights Movement."

Complete with 36 photographs, he has just completed a new biography on Langston Hughes for the Critical Lives series distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

His book "Origins of the Dream: Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric" traces Martin Luther King, Jr.'s use of Langston Hughes's poetry in his sermons and speeches from 1956 to 1968. This work is also the subject of a documentary film project currently being made in partnership with the Southern Documentary Fund.

His "King's First Dream" project has made the first ever recording of Dr. Martin Luther's King "I Have a Dream" speech available online at kingsfirstdream.com. This speech took place in Rocky Mount, North Carolina a full nine months before King's famous speech at the March on Washington in 1963.

His earlier book "Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture" investigates the nearly three dozen poems written by Hughes to reveal the complex interplay between politics, culture and art. It addresses key poems such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Christ in Alabama” and “Dream Deferred.”

He was inducted into the NC State Academy of Outstanding Teachers in 2017.