Academic

I completed my PhD in Global Intellectual History, Summa Cum Laude, at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2024. In the 2024-2025 academic year, I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Freie Unversität’s Friedrich Meinecke Institut.

Dissertation Abstract

This study, seeking a more global and materialist understanding of the relationship between colonial discourses and modern metropolitan sexualities, names as ‘primitivist homomythopoetics’ white gay men’s use of images of and ideas about supposedly primitive Others, whether long-dead classical civilizations or living racialized people, to create positive subjectivities and identify social roles for themselves in the twentieth century. It spans two sites, both acknowledged by existing scholarship as crucial to white gay male subjectivity formation: Germany in the Weimar Republic and California during the long 1960s. The first chapter demonstrates that primitivist homomythopoetics conditioned the creation of white gay male subjectivities in the German-speaking world, using photographs and gay magazines to analyze the dialogue between gay subjectivity and anthropology, the temporality and grammar of Weimar gay primitivism, links to other circulating non-enlightenment epistemologies and cultural radicalisms, and the surprising origins of queer anarchisms in the misogynist and antisemitic masculinist movement. The second chapter focuses on the artist Elisàr von Kupffer, whose new religion and attendant cyclorama painting mined the classical and primitive past to dream an androgynous, fascist queer future. Harry Hay, subject of the third chapter, was a key theorist of US-American gay liberation: the chapter analyzes his entanglements with interwar radicalisms and his extractive and racist apprehension of Native peoples and lifeworlds, both of which forged his so-called berdache theory of radical androgynous social roles for gay men. The final chapter considers gay liberation politics in California more broadly, examining non-enlightenment epistemologies and their connections to the Weimar era, the grammar of primitivist identification in gay liberation poetry, and the effects of primitivist homomythopoetics on gay liberation’s politics of solidarity. Provincializing the white gay man within queer history, this study problematizes queer theories of time and embodiment by demonstrating their relationship to and evolution from primitivist homomythopoetics. It theorizes correspondence as a method in global intellectual history by which the spread and transfer of ideas without direct connection can be apprehended. Joining a scholarly conversation seeking to move away from pat emplotments of romance, victimhood, and disavowal that characterize many queer histories, it adds to new histories of twentieth century radicalisms that emphasize their temporal expansiveness and contingency.

Additional Academic Publications

SPECIAL ISSUES/EDITORIAL

Jacobs, Christian, and Ben Miller. “Doing The Global Intellectual History of Social Movements.” Special issue co-editors. Global Intellectual History, in review (expected 2025).*

ARTICLES/ESSAYS

Miller, Ben. “Preface,” in DeWitt, Darren and Nicole Seymour, eds., Conservative Camp. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming (expected 2026). *

______. “Afterword,” in Schernikau, Ronald M. The Small-Town Novella, trans. Lucy Jones. New York: Ugly Duckling Press, forthcoming (expected 2025).

______. “Afterword: Auf Wiedersehen, à bientôt, goodnight.” In Birgit Lang, Ina Linge, and Katie Sutton, eds., Weimar Visions. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, forthoming (expected 2025)*

______. “What Is It, Then, between Us? Towards Critical Love in a Community Queer Archive.” In Reading Queer History: Queer Print Media in the German Speaking World. London: Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming (expected 2025)*

______. “What Remains is the Rest of Life: On Jürgen Baldiga and the Danger of a Single Story of HIV/AIDS ART. EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, forthcoming.

______. “Come Forth, O Children, Under the Stars: Harry Hay, the Gnostic Mass, and the Occult Influence on Gay Liberation.” In Queztal Arevelo and Lexi Johnson, eds., Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation, ONE Archives, Los Angeles, 2024.

———. “Rejecting The Klarwelt: How Elisar von Kupffer Complicates Queer History.” In To Be Seen: Queer Lives, 1900-1950, edited by Karolina Kühn and Mirjam Zadoff, 262–75. München: Hirmer, 2023.

———. “Queer History Now! (Review: The Queer Art of History – Queer Kinship after Fascism, by Jennifer Evans).” The Baffler, June 7, 2023. https://thebaffler.com/latest/queer-history-now-miller.

Florêncio, João, and ———. “Sexing the Archive: Gay Porn and Subcultural Histories.” Radical History Review 2022, no. 142 (January 1, 2022): 133–41. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9397115.*

———. “The Life and Death of Modern Homosexuality (Review: Sexual Hegemony – Statecraft, Sodomy, and the Transition to Capitalism, by Christopher Chitty).” The Baffler, January 28, 2021. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-life-and-death-of-modern-homosexuality-miller.

———. “Determined To Keep Up Their Dances.” In A Public Apology to Siksika Nation, by AA Bronson and Ben Miller, 77–109. Toronto: Toronto Biennial of Art, 2019.

———. “Review: The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture – By Heike Bauer.” Global Histories 4, no. 2 (October 15, 2018). https://doi.org/10.17169/GHSJ.2018.265. *

———. “Wofur Sind Wir Da? Harry Hay, Die Homosexuellenfrage, Und Das Erbe Des Marxismus.” Invertito: Jahrbuch Für Die Geschichte Der Homosexualitäten 18 (September 2018): 40–68 *

Peer Reviewing and Service

Manchester University Press, Queer and Trans Histories Series: Editorial Advisory Board

University of Toronto Press, Historical Materialism Book Series (Brill).

Teaching

FREIE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN | Winter Semester 2024-2025; Winter Semester 2022-2023; Winter Semester 2023-2024

Towards A Global Queer History (2024-2025)

Queer history and global history are both methods that are often mistaken for topics. In other words, both ‘queer’ and ‘global’ describe ways of doing history––ways of questioning disciplinary assumptions––that can reveal new patterns and structures in the study of the past. Both global and queer can, at their best, push us to reject identity politics and easy narratives of authenticity and belonging and to think more structurally and complexly about the past. This class aims to think towards a global queer history, including the meaning of queer and global histories in our present, the colonial instantiation of modern sexual subjectivities, sex-gender systems and difference, global trans history, gay liberation and anticolonial solidarity, racism in western queer movements, the global history of HIV and AIDS, and contemporary postcolonial backlashes to queer politics.

The Past and The ‘Orient’: Spaces of Salvation in Global Weimar Berlin (2022-2023, with Margrit Pernau)

A seminar examining the reaction to the experience of the Modern – expressed in the haunted constructions of the past and the ‘Orient’ – within the entangled radical political movements of Weimar Berlin. Homosexual emancipationists, feminists, Zionists, radical right-wingers, Life Reformers, and anti-colonial activists, often in surprising dialogue, all invested the past and the ‘Orient’ with desire, constructing them as locations of political possibility and escape. The seminar will critically investigate modernity and reactions to it both as categories of experience and as analytical concepts, alternating between the reading of theoretical and secondary texts and sources (textual and visual) from a variety of movements.

Thinking Sex: Some Radical Theories of the Politics of Sexuality (2023-2024)

This seminar, taught in the auspices of the module “Critical Peace and Gender Research” (Kritische Friedens- und Genderforschung) introduces students to a series of crucial texts in the development of radical theories of the politics of sexuality. Students will leave with a broad sense of the evolution of and relationship between activist and academic debates about sex and sexual politics, and will be able to apply these theoretical insights and approaches to the analysis of a broad variety of research questions in the study of political theories, actors, institutions, and conflicts. Students wishing to complete a module exam in this seminar will be asked to write an approx. 4500-word paper (Hausarbeit) deepening our in-class investigation of one of the discussion topics.

BERLIN WRITER’S WORKSHOP| Fall 2023, Spring 2024

Nonfiction Writing I

In Nonfiction Writing I, we studied the nonfiction novel, memoir and autofiction, criticism, journalism, and formally explosive work. Five weeks of intensive study of style and craft, of learning the most important thing we can learn in a writing class––how to talk about writing on its own terms––was be followed by three weeks of workshopping student workshop. A creative writing workshop is a method for thinking about writing. It is not a discussion of tastes and preferences, but instead an attempt to learn how to analyze a piece of writing on its own terms. The premise is that everyone is an active participant who can develop, together, a collective vocabulary for talking about writing.

HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN | September 2018-September 2019

Queer Fictions of the Past, Queer Histories of the Present

A co-taught two-semester project-oriented seminar for BA and MA students across disciplines approaching questions that cross boundaries of narrative, autofiction, oral history, and performance in the discovery of queer pasts from different perspectives. As a final project, students conducted their own oral history interviews and interpreted them through performance and/or artistic gesture, creating an archive of both history and affect.

Academic Conference Presentations (Selected)

AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION | New York, NY, January 2025

Co-convener of “Resexing Queer History” panel

AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION | San Francisco, CA, January 2024

Co-convener of “Queer Anarchisms” panel

DUKE-LEUPHANA TRANSATLANTIC PHD EXCHANGE, March 2024

In Search of Lost Time: Primitivist Homomythopoetics and the Self-Invention of the White Gay Man

GERMAN STUDIES ASSOCIATON | Montreal, QC, October 2023

Reading Queer History: Queer Print Media in the German Speaking World

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER | Exeter, UK, December 2022

Harry Hay and some Primitivist Origins of the Social Construction Theory of Sexuality

AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION | New Orleans, LA, November 2022

Queer Utopias: Socialist Feminism and Gay Liberation

WEIMAR VISIONS: PICTURING SEXUAL SUBJECTIVITIES | Berlin, October 2022

Invited commenter.

HISTORY OF WESTERN ESOTERICISM | ETH Zürich, April 2022

Elisar von Kupffer and Fascist Political Homosexuality

THE TOMATO PROJECT | ESAP, Porto, November 2020

Faggots and Class Struggle: Gay Liberation and Socialist Feminism

VIRAL MASCULINITES | University of Exeter, September 2020

Hans Heinrich von Twardowski and the Global History of Gay Liberation (Invited Presenter)

THE PASTS AND FUTURES OF QUEER GERMAN STUDIES | University of British Columbia, April 2020

Hans Heinrich von Twardowski and the Global History of Gay Liberation (Invited Presenter)

Public Talks (Selected)

FREIE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN | January 2025

The World In Global History: Themes and Perspectives

Primitivist Homomythopoetics and the Global History of the White Gay Man

UNIVERSITÄT HAMBURG | November 2024

Primitivism, Anthropology, and the Homoerotic Art of Sascha Schneider and Wilhelm von Gloeden

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES | September 2024

Karmiole Fellow Distinguished Lecture

Fashioning Liberation: Rudi Gernreich and the Counterculture

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA | September 2024

Robert Deam Tobin Distinguished Lecture in Queer and Trans German Studies

In Search of Lost Time: Primitivist Homomythopoetics and the Self-Invention of the White Gay Man

THE AMERICAN LIBRARY IN PARIS | June 2023