Richard B. Miller
Provost Professor - 2012 - 2014
Richard B. Miller is Provost Professor, Department of Religious Studies; Adjunct Professor, American Studies; Affiliate Faculty, the IU Center for Bioethics; and Director, Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Professor Miller received his B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1975 (Religious Studies), an M.A. from the Catholic University of America in 1982 (Theology), and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1985 (Ethics and Society). He joined IU in 1985 and upon promotion to full professor in 1996 was named a Finkelstein Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences. From 2000-3 he chaired the Department of Religious Studies. He received the James P. Holland Award for Exemplary Teaching and Service to Students in 2007 and the Tracy M. Sonneborn Award in 2012.
Professor Miller addresses a range of issues and authors in the history of Western religion and moral thought. His interests include religion and democratic theory, the ethics of war and peace, ethnographic and cultural studies, the ethics of belief, and bioethics. Miller is the author of Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition (1991), which received a Bross Prize and was designated an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice in 1992; Casuistry and Modern Ethics (1996), Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine (2003), and Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought (2010), which was designated an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice in 2011. He was a fellow in the Program in Ethics and the Professions at Harvard in 1997-98 and was PI of a collaborative project at IU, "Virtuous Empathy: Scientific and Humanistic Investigations" from 2010-12. He is the co-editor of the IU Press series, Bioethics and the Humanities. Miller's work has been supported by from NEH, Harvard, the Lilly Endowment, and the John Templeton Foundation.