Rate My Professor Shawn Miller

Shawn Miller, Professor of History at Brigham Young University, specializes in the environmental history of Brazil and Latin America. He joined the BYU History Department in 1997 shortly after completing his Ph.D. in History at Columbia University. He holds a B.A. in History from Brigham Young University, earned in 1990. Miller's academic interests center on the historical dimensions of environmental change, resource management, and human-environment interactions in Latin America. His work covers colonial conservation efforts in Brazil's timber economy, labor and environmental dynamics in the Northeast Brazilian sugar industry, the transformation of urban public spaces amid automobile culture in Rio de Janeiro, and the protracted history of the Pan-American Highway initiative.

In his administrative career at BYU, Miller served as Chair of the Department of History from 2007 and as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences from 2012 to 2015. He received the Jack Bailey Teaching & Learning Faculty Fellow award for 2020-2023. For his contributions to the field, he was honored with the Elinor Melville Book Prize for Environmental History by the Conference on Latin American History in 2008. Miller's books have had a substantial impact, with his publications collectively cited over 1,040 times on Google Scholar. Notable works include Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber (Stanford University Press, 2000), An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2007), The Street is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Dream Road to Pan America: A Century in Pursuit of the World's Longest Road. He has also authored articles and book chapters on related themes. Beyond academia, Miller presented a devotional at BYU in 2010 and engages in discussions on environmental stewardship and urban planning.