Prof Pavla Miller
Professor Emerita Pavla Miller
SENIOR ASSOCIATE
Pavla Miller is Professor Emerita of Historical Sociology at RMIT University in Melbourne. An interdisciplinary scholar, she received her PhD in politics at the University of Adelaide. Her publications include Long Division: State Schooling in South Australian Society (1986), Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500-1900 (1998), and Patriarchy (2017). Most recently, she revised and completed Mining Gold and Manufacturing Ignorance: Occupational Lung Disease and the Buying and Selling of Labor in Southern Africa (2022), drafted by Jock McCulloch before his untimely death in 2018.
Professor Miller’s initial research dealt with the history of compulsory schooling, first in Australia and later in western Anglophone countries. Interest in gendered historical causality then led to work on historical transformations of patriarchal governance, and the ways that the concept of patriarchy has been thought with during significant periods of western history. Related projects dealt with demographic explanations of low fertility, masters and servants’ legislation, squatters and patrimonialism, time-use and household division of labour, and conceptualisations of children’s work. These research projects informed – and benefitted from - many years of teaching several overview undergraduate and postgraduate courses: on family, sex and gender, social shaping of technology, social theory, and research strategies.
Professor Miller has held a number of research-related roles, including several years’ service as Deputy Dean, Research and Innovation, in one of the largest schools at RMIT. In this capacity, she provided detailed assistance to colleagues designing funded research projects and helped organise and conduct appropriate workshops. Through her contribution to College and University committees, she also gained strategic knowledge of effective approaches to productive research.
Her new book, authored with Jock McCulloch, Mining Gold and Manufacturing Ignorance: Occupational Lung Disease and the Buying and Selling of Labour in Southern Africa is available now with open access.