Benjamin Miller

Ph.D. Candidate

Benjamin Miller is a graduate student in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies.  He hails from Sitka, Alaska, where he grew up fishing commercially with his family.  His undergraduate years were spent at Northwest Nazarene University. Benjamin's historical interests center broadly on mobile communities, boundary crossing(s), borderlands studies, and the practice of religion in early modern armies.

Focusing primarily on the early modern German territory of Hessen-Kassel, Benjamin is currently finishing his dissertation on German military chaplains as key intermediary agents between the often contradictory impulses of Christianity and state violence; military and civilian life; and competing religious communities. He is especially interested in the ways in which chaplains brokered the frequently-conflicting demands of the communities they belonged to and how they charted their own course in the intersections between these groups.