Elizabeth Russell Miller was a Professor Emerita at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a leading expert on all things Dracula.
Elizabeth Russell, later Elizabeth Miller, attended Memorial University, where she fulfilled the requirements for a BA, a BA(Ed), an MA and a Ph.D.
Her Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 1987, was a critical biography of the Canadian writer Norman Duncan, who penned some of the finest short stories ever written about Newfoundland.
Miller had been a member of the Department of English Language and Literature at Memorial for some years before attaining her Ph.D., teaching in the areas of Newfoundland writing and writers of the Romantic era.
It was through such Romantic era writers as Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Polidori, who wrote the first novel to contain the character who became known as Dracula, that she became interested in Count Dracula herself.
Throughout the decades, she became a recognized expert on Bram Stoker and Dracula, the character he made larger than life in so many ways. Miller thought that Stoker was a serious writer and that Dracula was a character worthy of study.
Between 1997 and 2012, she wrote or edited and published seven books on Dracula, the latter, entitled The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker, on which her co-editor was Dacre Stoker, grand-nephew of Bram Stoker.
Elizabeth Miller was also the impetus behind 20-plus articles on aspects of Stoker and Dracula; she delivered lectures at universities, learned studies, conferences, ballet productions, and private functions. She also became involved in several television documentaries and scores of newspaper and magazine articles on the two.
Dr. Elizabeth Miller passed peacefully away in Toronto, Ontario. She was 82.