Jennifer M. Miller

Professor Miller's main research interest is the history of U.S. foreign relations, especially U.S.-East Asian relations in the second half of the twentieth century. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Cold War Democracy: The United States and Japan, 1945 - 1963. This manuscript examines the development of the U.S.-Japanese relationship from the end of World War II to Japan's economic resurgence in the early 1960s. Challenging U.S. and Japanese policymakers’ long celebration of this alliance as a smooth, democratic “partnership,” it examines how democracy was a source of both connection and, more importantly, tension in this relationship. Building on the U.S. occupation of Japan, U.S. policymakers hoped to root this alliance in democratic legitimacy and elevate the U.S.-Japanese alliance as a model for other Asian states. In contrast, many Japanese drew on the recent experience of war and occupation to frame the U.S.-Japanese alliance—and the Japanese government’s support of it—as a deep violation of postwar Japanese democracy. Looking at diverse American and Japanese actors—diplomats and students, labor activists, philanthropists, and intellectuals—Cold War Democracy rethinks the U.S.-Japanese alliance as the product of competing visions of democracy in the Cold War.

Portions of this research have been published in the Journal of Contemporary History, Diplomatic History, and in an edited volume entitled The Power of the Past. The author of two oral history collections on the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Professor Miller is also a faculty leader of the Dartmouth Vietnam Project.