Dr. Laura Miller received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1988. As of August 2010, she fills the Endowed Chair in Japanese Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Dr. Miller is an internationally prominent scholar of Japan studies and linguistic anthropology. She has done fieldwork in Moscow and in Japan (Kansai area, Kanazawa, and Tokyo). After graduation from the University of California, Santa Barbara with BA degrees in Anthropology and Asian Studies, Dr. Miller taught English and supervised an English language program for Teijin Educational Systems in Osaka, Japan (1977-1981). She began teaching college-level anthropology in the 1980s, and has been a faculty member at several universities. At the University of Missouri-St. Louis, she primarily teaches new courses on Japanese culture.

Dr. Miller has published more than fifty articles and book chapters on Japanese culture and language, including topics such as English loanwords in Japanese, the wizard boom, girls’ slang, and print club photos. Three recent peer-reviewed journal articles are “Cute masquerade and the pimping of Japan,” International Journal of Japanese Sociology (2011), “Tantalizing tarot and cute cartomancy in Japan,” Japanese Studies (2011 and “Subversive script and novel graphs in Japanese girls’ culture,” Language & Communication (2011). Her 2004 article, “Those naughty teenage girls: Japanese Kogals, slang, and media assessments” in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, has been one of the most frequently accessed articles in the American Anthropological Association’s publishing database.


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