In his research, Keith Miller mainly focuses on the rhetoric and songs of the civil rights movement. He is the author of Martin Luther King's Biblical Epic: His Great, Final Speech and Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources, which was favorably reviewed in Washington Post and is widely cited. His essays on Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Jackie Robinson, Frederick Douglass, C.L. Franklin, and Fannie Lou Hamer have appeared in many scholarly collections and in such leading journals as College English, College Composition and Communication, Publication of the Modern Language Association, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Journal of American History. His essay “Second Isaiah Lands in Washington, D.C.: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ as Biblical Narrative and Biblical Hermeneutic” was awarded Best Essay of the Year in Rhetoric Review in 2007.

His co-edited books include Selected Essays of Jim W. Corder (with James Baumlin), Beyond PostProcess and Postmodernism (with Theresa Enos), and New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in the U.S. (with Kevin Everod Quashie and Joyce Lausch). He has given scholarly presentations at many national conferences and at Cambridge University, Stanford University, Columbia University, Florida State University, Penn State University, University of Alabama--Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama--Birmingham, and University of Arizona. A former associate chair of the Department of English and former Writing Program administrator, he co-authors with ASU graduate students. He has also taught at Texas Christian University, Ohio State University, and Chonbuk University of Jeonju, South Korea.