CAV Member Spotlight

Dr. John F. Miller, the Arthur F. and Marian W. Stocker Professor of Classics, at the University of Virginia, just recently retired from a forty year career in Classics at UVA. Dr. Miller earned his Honors BA at Xavier University in Cincinnati, MA in Comparative Literature, and PhD in Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first six years of full-time teaching were at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, after which he taught at the University of Virginia for 40 years.

John grew up in Northern Virginia and went to high school in DC. At college in Cincinnati, he met Mary and they married right after graduation. For a honeymoon they went to Chapel Hill for the six years of his graduate study, during which Mary was the main breadwinner. They will celebrate their 53rd anniversary in August.

When asked about a favorite educational memory, Dr. Miller responded, “I have had so many wonderful opportunities and rewarding experiences in my teaching career that it’s impossible to single out one. Some of the highlights are the courses at UVA that I team-taught with colleagues who were specialists in adjacent fields like ancient art or history (e.g. the Age of Augustus; Roman Religion), both at the undergraduate and graduate level; the many weekend workshops and summer seminars for high school teachers that I organized, which gave me the opportunity to know better the challenges of K-12 teachers, and of their students whom I would see at UVA in the future; and the lectures to the gung-ho high school students at the Virginia Governor’s Latin Academy, at which I’m proud to say I was invited to speak every year since the founding in 1988 through last summer (2024).”

Dr. Miller stated that the Latin poet Ovid is his “favorite Latin author because of his penetrating exploration of human experience and his challenging take on contemporary Augustan culture; also because he responds to so much of Greek and Latin literature and because of his nearly inexhaustible capacity throughout his many works over a long career to revisit the same or similar moments in mythology or human life again and again from different points of view.” Lately John has been reading many memoirs of travel and a lot of Italian novels. Although John claimed to not be much of a hobbyist, he had been a devoted (daily) runner until he shattered his back in an accident a few years ago. Now he satisfies “his addiction to aerobic exercise with long walks every afternoon.”

Dr. Miller closed out the interview with this thought for any young person considering a career in the classics. “One piece of advice I would share with teachers of Latin and Classics at any level is to seek out colleagues beyond your school to share perspectives and resources and for mutual support. Often in a K-12 school there is only one Latin teacher; at colleges and universities Classics departments are usually small. So there are a lot of benefits to reaching out to colleagues elsewhere—this applies as well to college faculty interacting with their K-12 colleagues and vice versa. One of the strengths of the classical community in Virginia is that there is a real such community comprised of teachers from middle schools, high schools, and colleges, centered in the Classical Association of Virginia. At a time when everyone is busier than ever, it’s important, I think, to remember how much your participation in such efforts are appreciated by colleagues, and how much you—and your students—have to gain from keeping Virginia’s classical community flourishing.”

If you have not read the recent article by Lorenzo Perez, A&S Editorial Director at UVA, please do so as it is a lovely tribute to Dr. Miller and his stellar career.

Please join me in celebrating Dr. John F. Miller for his extraordinary career, and when you see him next, ask John for updates on how he is spending his “retired life.” I bet there will be many classically related moments and travels.

Submitted by Sue Robertson, Historian