Professional biography

Carolyn R. Miller is SAS Institute Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication at North Carolina State University, where she has taught since 1973.  She received her Ph.D. in Communication and Rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1980.  She was Visiting Associate Professor at Michigan Tech and Penn State in 1988, Visiting Professor at Georgia Tech in 1991, and Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil in 2007.

Dr. Miller's research interests are in digital rhetoric, rhetorical theory, the rhetoric of science and technology, and technical and professional writing. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Argumentation, College English, the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetorica, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly, as well as in edited volumes published by university and commercial presses. Three of these publications have won awards from the National Council of Teachers of English.

She is a past president of the Rhetoric Society of America and was named a Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing in 1995. In 2006, she received the Rigo Award for lifetime contributions to the field of communication design from the ACM SIGDOC. Dr. Miller's professional service includes terms on the governing boards of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the MLA Division on the History and Theory of Rhetoric and Composition, and the Rhetoric Society of America. She currently serves as editor of Rhetoric Society Quarterly and has previously served on the editorial boards of College Composition and Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Written Communication. 

At North Carolina State University, Dr. Miller teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetoric and technical writing for the Department of English.  She has been a member of the university’s Academy of Outstanding Teachers since 1984 and in 1999 was named Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor. 

Dr. Miller is the founding director of NC State's Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, established in 2005, and of the M.S. in Technical Communication, started in 1988; she also proposed and taught the first graduate courses for the M.A. option in Rhetoric and Composition, begun in 1984. She served as Director of Professional Writing in 1993–2002 and 2003–2004. She established and directed the Center for Communication in Science, Technology, and Management from 1995 to 1999 and co-directed its successor, the Center for Information Society Studies, from 1999 to 2003.

Personal biography

I grew up in State College, Pennsylvania, where my father was a chemistry professor at Penn State. Although my mother had also been a chemistry major at Ohio State (one of very few women in 1941!), she was interested in history and literature as well and encouraged my love of reading. As an undergraduate I majored in English, but I had a summer and part-time job in a biophysics lab at Penn State, where I did my B.A. and M.A. In the lab, I started out washing glassware but soon was conducting experiments under the direction of a senior scientist, and I was even a junior author on a publication in Science. I met my husband, Carl Blackman, in the biophysics lab where he was a graduate student; he is now a research biologist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Research Triangle.

After my master's degree, I worked as a technical writer and editor for about four years—for a textbook publisher on Long Island (Barron's Educational Series); for a technical consulting firm (Volt), a scientific publisher (American Physiological Society), and a medical newspaper (International Medical News Service), all in suburban Washington, DC (all, amazingly, still in business); and then for a federally funded higher education consulting firm in Durham, NC (unsurprisingly, no longer in business). Based on that experience, I started teaching technical writing at NC State in 1973, and after a few years I went back to school for my doctoral degree at Rensselaer, where I discovered the field of rhetorical studies.

I've lived in Raleigh, NC, since 1973, in a house "inside the Beltline," near a large wooded area with lots of wildlife. We've seen turtles, snakes, raccoons, possums, a fox, and hawks in the yard, as well as many songbirds. Wood thrushes sing in the evenings, and we occasionally hear a great-horned owl back in the woods. I have been learning to garden in red clay and shade for 30 years, though after we lost nearly all our red oaks to Hurricane Fran in 1996, I've had a chance to plant for sun (we still have plenty of white oaks and some hickories, maples, dogwoods, and other trees).

Vita

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More information

See personal biography below and additional information and pictures on the "Etcetera" page linked above.

Last update 15-Jun-2008