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<\/p>\nMany people have asked me, since my legal name is Wael Taji Miller, why I publish as Wael Taji. The answer is actually very simple.<\/p>\n
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Firstly, it’s probably worth mentioning that I have used many different names in my life. Living in China, one has to have a Chinese name, for example (\u9a6c\u7ef4\u5c14, if you’re wondering). Yet this is totally different to my (probably unnecessary) Japanese name that I used when I was living and working there (\u5b6b\u5a01\u53f2, for the curious). In hindsight, I probably just wanted to have a kanji for my name because I thought they were cool. This is why for me, working under a name that is different than my strictly legal one doesn’t feel weird – I’ve written and published content using five or more aliases already in my lifetime, usually to suit the cultural or linguistic context, but on rare occasions also to preserve anonymity.<\/p>\n
Of course, that doesn’t answer the question: why use a different name now? Again, the answer is exceedingly simple.<\/p>\n
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Searching for ‘Miller’ in CiteSeer, which indexes citations and author names, we can see over 25,000 results. This is unsurprising, given that the Yiddo-Anglo-Germanic nomen is the third most common surname for Jews<\/a> in the United States, and the 7th most popular for non-Jews<\/a>. Because both Jews and Americans (by no means mutually exclusive categories) are powerhouse output demographics for global English-language scholarship, Bayesian inference would make this a predictable result.<\/p>\n This would be a non-issue had I not decided at the age of 12 that I wanted to become a professor. It became an even greater issue when I shelved my previous plans of writing books on culture and philosophy in Japanese in order to become a scientist, working in English. The barrier faced by academic researchers whose names are too common to make them identifiable even within highly specialized fields is widely recognized. A ‘career tips’ section from one university<\/a> notes:<\/p>\n Consider using a name identifier, particularly if you have a common name, to help people distinguish your research from others and help stop any of your citations from \u2018escaping\u2019. The recommended name identifier scheme is ORCID<\/a>, which works with both Scopus and Thomson Reuters\u2019 Web of Science to allow researchers to \u2018claim\u2019 their publications<\/p><\/blockquote>\n ORCID is a great system; I have an ORCID ID and use it for my journal submissions. But it’s long, clumsy, and impossible to use in informal language. “Hey man – did you read that article by 0000-0003-0166-248X?” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, at least to me. One solution many researchers resort to is a middle name<\/strong>, which is convenient as mine is technically also a surname anyway. As you can see here, Taji is a vastly<\/em> more recognizable name in English-language scholarship. Ironically, many of the Tajis listed here are actually Japanese, but alternate searches using more recognizably Arabic permutations such as ‘Eltaji’ or ‘Al-Taji’ amount to less than 10 results.\u00a0The difference becomes most stark when using Google Ngram viewer, as you can see here: So even despite a surprising amount of Taji or Al-Taji activity during the mid-1900s, it would appear that Miller remains the far more widely used surname. It’s also not recognizably Coptic, which becomes bothersome when I write about Christian theology or philosophy referencing Arabic sources and am bombarded by frenetic demands to justify my Ashkenazi surname.<\/p>\n Since you’ve probably been brought here out of curiosity, I hope that this explanation managed to answer all your questions.<\/p>\n P.S: For the etymologically curious, t\u0101j<\/strong> is an Arabic word meaning ‘crown’ that is lexically productive as a loanword in Farsi, Urdu, Pashtun, and probably also other languages. As an adjective, t\u0101j\u012b <\/strong>essentially means ‘crownly’ or ‘kingly,’ but isn’t commonly used. In both forms, the word is found in personal names (both forenames<\/a> and surnames<\/a>) as well as in place names<\/a> throughout the greater Middle-East (think Taj Mahal<\/a>, or ‘crown of the palace’). It’s also the name of a teeny little bird<\/a> in Farsi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many people have asked me, since my legal name is Wael Taji Miller, why I publish as Wael Taji. The answer is actually very simple. Firstly, it’s probably worth mentioning that I have used many different names in my life. Living in China, one has to have a Chinese name, for example (\u9a6c\u7ef4\u5c14, if you’re … Continue reading Why do I write under a different name?<\/span> ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/coevolutionist.com\/muse\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Screen-Shot-2018-10-21-at-11.30.18-1.png\")
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