James S. Miller (1953–2022): Remembering a Great Entomologist, Musician, and Friend

INSECT SYSTEMATICS lost a singular talent on 24 March 2022, when James S. Miller died suddenly. He was 69. Jim was among the most skilled and respected biosystematists of our times. Jim’s revisionary treatments of Lepidoptera were models for all of us, drawing from a deep respect for the works of his predecessors, careful study of genitalic and whole-body preparations, an appreciation for early stages, and his graduate training in ecology, evolutionary biology, and systematics. He was a skilled writer, using tight, spare, yet colorful prose—not verse, but close. His taxonomic works were scholarly, illustrated with his own detailed pen-and-ink artwork, scanning electron micrographs, larval images, and photographs from his field work. He made monography beautiful, elevating regard for the animals that he studied. Jim grew up on the prairies of Saskatchewan, where his loves of nature and music were nurtured by his parents. The Saskatoon Boys Choir, in which he sang soprano, became renowned, traveling the province and beyond in a yellow school bus (foreshadowing the years Jim would spend touring as a musician with Donna the Buffalo, Red Dog Run, Western Centuries, and other bands). During his early teens, his family moved to New Haven, Connecticut, when his father, Richard S. Miller, joined the faculty as an ecologist in Yale’s School of Forestry. With a B.A. from Hampshire College in 1976, Jim was admitted to SUNY Stony Brook’s Ph.D. program, where he studied the ecological genetics of the fall cankerworm, Alsophila pometaria (Geometridae), with Doug Futuyma. But after two years, Jim transferred to Cornell’s ecology and systematics department to join Paul Feeny’s lab, which focused on interactions between swallowtail butterflies (Papilionidae) and their host plants. While he remained anchored to Feeny’s insect ecology lab, Jim’s coursework in the entomology department (and especially his interactions with John “Jack” Franclemont, John Rawlins, and other graduate students) drew him to biosystematics, phylogenetics, and taxonomy. Jim’s dissertation, “Phylogenetic Systematics and Chemical Constraints on Host-Plant Associations in the Papilioninae (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae),” deftly married his ecoevolutionary underpinnings to cladistics and taxonomy. He grew especially close to Franclemont and soon came to share Jack’s lifelong interests in Notodontidae. Jim was offered a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship to study at the National Museum of Natural History in 1986. His 1991 monograph on the higher classification of the Notodontidae, based on his studies of adult and larval morphology, set the stage for his opus on dioptine notodontids.

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