Breathless: An American Girl in Paris

After graduating from Barnard College, Nancy K. Miller sailed to Paris to study French literature and complete a master's degree. Already in love with the city from movies and novels, she hoped to create a new, more sophisticated identity for her twenty-year-old, nice-New York-Jewish-girl self. Several years of adventures and misadventures later, including marriage to an American ex-pat, Miller returned to New York minus the husband but ready to reinvent herself as an academic and writer.

Now a well-known feminist scholar, Miller has authored and edited more than a dozen books, publishing literary criticism, personal essays, and family memoirs. Her most recent memoir, What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, won the Jewish Journal Prize for 2012 and told the story of her quest to recreate her family's lost history. She is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches classes in memoirs, graphic novels, and women's studies. Miller lectures widely, both nationally and internationally, and her work is anthologized in popular volumes on autobiography and collections of feminist essays. She also co-edits Columbia University Press's Gender and Culture series, which she co-founded in 1983 with the late Carolyn Heilbrun.