Professor Miller specializes in African-American and American literature and cultural studies. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century African-American literature, film, and contemporary art; contemporary literature and cultural studies of the black diaspora; performance studies; and intersectional studies of race, gender, and sexuality.

Her book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, was published by Duke University Press in 2009. It received the 2010 William Sanders Scarborough Prize for the best book in African American literature and culture from the Modern Language Association; it was shortlisted for the 2010 Modernist Studies Association book prize.

Professor Miller is the recipient of grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2012, 2001), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2004), and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (2004). She served as a Term Fellow at Institute for Research in African American Studies, Columbia University (2011-13). She was the recipent of the Gladys Brooks Junior Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award, Barnard College (2008).