Heather Miller

 

Heather Miller is a Ph.D. student in History of Judaism at the Divinity School.

Heather is from Vernon, Connecticut, and earned her B.A. from Georgetown University in 2001, with majors in Theology and English. She received a graduate diploma from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in 2002, for which she submitted a dissertation entitled “The Non-Jew in Jewish Thought: The Importance of the Noahide Concept to Inter-Religious Dialogue.”

After spending many hours in the Divinity School both as a student and as an employee at the Divinity School Coffee Shop (“where God drinks coffee,” as our motto states), I feel my affection for Swift Hall is well founded. Both inside and outside the classroom I have been witness to, and have profited from, the collegial exchange of ideas that is the bedrock of intellectual life at the Divinity School. In Swift Hall, professors and students are willing to engage in lively debate over popular questions of scholarship, and also willing to help individuals think creatively about their personal intellectual projects. The Divinity School is a supportive community of scholars that successfully pushes each thinker further in her ideas.

Last winter, I was admitted into the Ph.D. program in the History of Judaism, so this is my first year of Ph.D. work. I have had wonderful classes with Professor Mendes-Flohr and Professor Fishbane in this committee, and I am excited to take classes with Professor Robinson and Professor Frymer-Kensky in the future. As my interests involve both Jewish and Christian thought, it is important for me to be reasonably well versed in both traditions. All members of this committee have been very open and supportive of Jewish-Christian comparative work generally, as well as my personal goals.

I am interested in the relationship between religious communities and their respective governments in the modern period. I want to focus on how the Jewish community, as a minority religious group in Western Europe, negotiated the changing legal and political environment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Enlightenment thinking revised the ideas of citizen, civil society, and religion, producing significant, on-the-ground political changes affecting the civic status and political boundaries of the Jewish community. I hope to explore how the Jews responded to these developments by examining how their community leaders, within their own conversations as well as in the public arena, handled the legal and political changes.

Fundamentally, the questions I am asking revolve around religion. While social history, cultural history, and political philosophy will be major components of my future scholarship, the focus of my thoughts involves the relationship between religion and government, and religion and political identity. Such interdisciplinary interests are allowed to flourish at the University of Chicago. I have been able to discuss my ideas with members of the law school faculty and the history faculty, allowing me access to a variety of viewpoints and a wealth of expertise – things that all aspirants to the academy know is invaluable for good scholarship.