Carnegie Mellon University

Obituary: David William Miller Was an Acclaimed Scholar of Irish and Religious History

September 25, 2019

Obituary: David William Miller Was an Acclaimed Scholar of Irish and Religious History

By Abby Simmons

A professor emeritus in the Department of History, Miller joined CMU's faculty in 1967. His dissertation, completed at the University of Chicago, became an important book, "Church, State, and Nation in Ireland, 1898-1921" (Gill and Macmillan, 1973). Miller spent a significant amount of time in Belfast over the three decades that marked the Irish Troubles. He took an interest in in Ulster loyalism and wrote the book "Queen's Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective" (Gill and Macmillan, 1978). Reflecting its enduring importance, University College Dublin published a second edition in its Classics of Irish History series in 2007.

Miller is recognized as one of the few Irish history scholars who conducted sophisticated, quantitative research on topics ranging from Irish Catholic Mass attendance to social inequality. He contributed to the leading journals in Irish history, but also to journals such as the Journal of Social History, Past and Present, Social Science History, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

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