Tim Sterner Miller

Education

PhD., Musicology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.A., Musicology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.M., History of Musical Instruments, University of South Dakota
B.M., Music Theory and Composition, University of Delaware

Biography

Tim Sterner Miller teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Renaissance and Early Modern music, 20^th and 21^st century art music, popular music, and world musics. In his courses, students learn to understand musical activities and the discourses that surround them as reflections of the historical, cultural, and political contexts that they inhabit. He also directs the UWM Early Music Ensemble, a learning group that allows students to explore instruments and repertories from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century in a relaxed, hands-on environment. A strong advocate for bringing music history to the public, he has served on the board of directors for Milwaukee’s Early Music Now and provided program notes and talks for Milwaukee organizations such as the Fine Arts Quartet and the Florentine Opera Company.

Dr. Sterner Miller earned his MA and PhD in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill following an MM in the History of Musical Instruments from the University of South Dakota, where he studied and worked in the collections of the National Music Museum. His research is centered on the study of musical instruments, instrumentalists, and instrument-centered communities.  His scholarship on the pedal steel guitar and its makers and players has been published in the second edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music and the Oxford Handbook of Country Music (Oxford University Press, 2017). He has presented his research at conferences of the Society for American Music, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the American Musical Instruments Society. His ongoing research explores the reciprocal relationships between instrument design and construction and the processes of musical learning, improvisation, and community building. This research encompasses topics in the fields of popular music, American vernacular and art music, early music, and world musics.

As a musician, Dr. Sterner Miller has studied and performed on numerous instruments in a variety of traditions including symphonic music, jazz, and pop on acoustic and electric bass; Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music on lute, theorbo, viol, and other plucked and bowed strings; Hindustani music on sitar and tabla; and vernacular U.S. styles of mandolin, banjo, and steel guitar. He is a founder and co-director of the New Milwaukee Consort and has recently played lute for the Wisconsin Baroque Ensemble and Optimist Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park and Shakespeare in the City series, where he composed original music in the style of the time for their 2026 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Curriculum Vitae, CV (PDF)

Recent & Selected Works

Chapters

Sterner Miller, Tim. “This Machine Plays Country Music: Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar.” The Oxford Handbook of Country Music, ed. Travis Stimeling, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 177–204..