[1] Born in 1947, James Miller was Chair of Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research from 1992 until 2013.

His most recent book, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

He is the author of five other books: Flowers in the Dustbin: the Rise of Rock & Roll, 1947-1977, winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award and a Ralph Gleason BMI award for best music book of 1999; The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993), an interpretive essay on the life of the French philosopher and a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for General Nonfiction, which has been translated into nine languages; Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987), an account of the American student movement of the 1960s, also a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for General Nonfiction; Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (1984), a study of the origins of modern democracy; and History and Human Existence - From Marx to Merleau-Ponty, an analysis of Marx and the French existentialists.

Besides publishing in such peer-reviewed academic journals as History and Theory and Political Theory, he has contributed to a variety of reference works, from Encyclopædia Britannica[2] and A New Literary History of America,[3] published by Harvard in 2009, to the Dictionnaire de Philosophie Morale edited by Monique Canto-Sperber in 1996.

A native of Chicago, he was educated at Pomona College in California, and at Brandeis University, where he received a Ph.D. in the History of Ideas in 1976.