Dr Eva Miller

Eva is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL History. She is a cultural historian with an interest in public art, museums and exhibitions, and popular understandings of the deep past.

Her postdoctoral project explored the ancient Middle East, the modern West, and the relationship between the two, through asking questions about processes of rediscovery, transmission, and reception. She is interested in the wider intellectual climates that shaped and were shaped by the rediscovery of ‘new pasts’ from Egypt and Iraq, and how they wound up being used, by different groups and in different ways, to work out what it meant to be modern. She has explored how these pasts became part of a self-justifying teleological narrative of a ‘rise of civilization’, and a transfer from East to West, in her book, Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern Origins in the United States, 1893–1939 (UCL Press 2024). Her edited volume Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East: Archaeology, Empires, Nations (with Guillemette Crouzet, Bloomsbury 2025) considered how antiquity(/ies) and archaeology were mobilised by European and Middle Eastern imperial and national powers, and ordinary dealers, writers, and administrators on the ground.

Increasingly, her research focuses on larger questions about interpreting the past, and the significance of ‘origins’ and ‘firsts’ in museums and public culture. Among other areas, she has worked on self-Orientalising German Jewish art, cryptozoological investigations of living dinosaurs attested in ancient Babylonian artefacts, anthropological theories of the evolution of languages and writing, modernist theories about the ziggurat as the ideal skyscraper, and the role of art in science museums.

Eva's background is in the art, history, and languages of ancient Mesopotamia. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford where her thesis investigated representations of enemy punishment in palace art and Akkadian cuneiform texts of the 7th century BCE Assyrian monarch Ashurbanipal. She has previously been a teaching fellow for the ancient Middle East at UCL History, a teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham, and Henri Frankfort Fellow at the Warburg Institute.

Notable publications

• Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern Origins in the United States, 1893–1939. 2024. UCL Press, available open access here.
• Co-editor with Guillemette Crouzet, Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East: Archaeology, Empires, Nations. 2025. Bloomsbury Academic, available here.
• ‘Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss’ Retrofuturism’. The Public Domain Review, 9 April 2025.
• 'A New Look for the Jewish Past: Historicism, Authenticity, and Fantasy in E. M. Lilien’s Bible Art'. The Art Bulletin 105, no. 1 (2023): 37–63.
• ‘The Dinosaur from 600 BCE! Interpreting the Dragon of Babylon, from Archaeological Excavation into Fringe Science’. Endeavour 45, no. 4 (2021): 100798. 

Teaching

Advanced Seminar: The Universal Museum, the World's Fair, and the Exhibition of Everything, 1800–present

Grants/Projects

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow for the project 'A New Antiquity: Western Reception and Revival of Ancient Assyria in Decorative Arts and Architecture, 1850-1935'

Contact information

Email: e.miller@ucl.ac.uk

Office: 23 Gordon Square, Room G01

External roles

• 'Organiser of the 2023 Warwick Global History and Culture Centre Annual Conference, 'Archaeology, Antiquity, and the Making of the Modern Middle East: Global Histories 1800–1939
• 'Trustee for the British Institute for the Study of Iraq
• Convenor for the London Centre for the Ancient Near East seminar series, Autumn 2018

Qualifications

DPhil University of Oxford, 2017