Marla Miller

assistant professor, public history, UMASS Amherst

Marla Miller's primary research interest is U.S. women's work before industrialization. Her book, The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution, appeared from the University of Massachusetts Press in August 2006, and won the Costume Society of America's Millia Davenport Publication Award for the best book in the field for that year. Related articles have appeared in the New England Quarterly (1998), the proceedings of the Dublin Seminar on New England Folklife (2000), and the William and Mary Quarterly (2003). She is presently completing work on a microhistory of women and work in Federal Massachusetts, and diving into a new project that she is especially excited about: a scholarly biography of that most-misunderstood early American craftswoman, Betsy Ross. As Director of the History Department's Public History program, Marla also teaches courses in Public History, American Material Culture, and Museum and Historic Site Interpretation, and continues to consult with a wide variety of museums and historic sites.