J. Hillis Miller is a Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Comparative Literature and English at UC Irvine. He is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of nineteenth and twentieth century English and American literature and in literary theory.
Miller was born in Newport News, Virginia on March 5, 1928. He spent much of his childhood on college and university campuses in New York as his father, J. Hillis Miller, Sr., served as both President of Keuka College and as Associate Commissioner of Higher and Professional Education for New York State. In 1944, at the age of sixteen, Miller entered Oberlin College intending to study physics. In his sophomore year, with encouragement from his future wife, Dorothy James, he changed his course of study to literature.
Following his graduation from Oberlin in January of 1948, Miller entered the graduate program in English at Harvard University receiving his Master’s degree in 1949 and his Ph.D. in 1952. While at Harvard, Miller studied under many prominent scholars including Hyder Rollins, George Sherburn, Archibald MacLeish, Walter Jackson Bate, and Douglas Bush, but found himself drawn away from traditional literary study and toward works on literary theory and criticism. His unpublished dissertation, directed by Douglas Bush and entitled “The Symbolic Imagery of Charles Dickens,” was strongly influenced by the theories of Kenneth Burke.
In 1953, after a year as an Instructor in English at Williams College, Miller was appointed Assistant Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He remained at Johns Hopkins for nineteen years, reaching the rank of Professor, serving as chair of the department, and holding a joint appointment in the Humanities Center. In Baltimore, Miller came into contact with several scholars who influenced his work, notably Georges Poulet and “new critic” E.R. Wasserman. It was also at the famous Hopkins Symposium in 1966 that Miller first met Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan.
In 1972, Miller left Johns Hopkins for Yale University where he was first made Professor of English, and later Gray Professor of Rhetoric, Frederick W. Hilles Professor of English, and Frederick W. Hilles Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He also served as Chair of the Department of English, Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature, and Director of the Literature Major. During this time, Miller became associated with a group of critics and theorists including Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom. Members of this group were sometimes referred to as the “Yale School of Deconstruction.”
After fourteen years at Yale, Miller left New Haven in 1986 to become Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC, Irvine. At Irvine, Miller served on the Advisory Committee of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, many graduate student examination and dissertation committees, and was an active member of the School of Humanities' Critical Theory Institute, for which he delivered the Wellek Library Lectures, “The Ethics of Reading,” in 1985. Miller has also taught as a visiting professor at a number of universities, including the University of Hawaii, Harvard, The University of Virginia, Princeton, the University of Washington, the University of Zurich, Emory, Tulane, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Irvine and Dartmouth Schools of Criticism and Theory, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars.
Over the course of his career, Miller has authored twenty-nine books, and published more than two hundred articles. He has been a member of editorial boards for twenty-three literary journals, including Victorian Studies, ELH, Studies in English Literature, Diacritics, and The Yale Journal of Criticism.
Miller is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships. In 1986, he served as president of the Modern Language Association, and received the organization’s lifetime achievement award in 2005. In 1993, Miller received the Doctoris Honoris Causa at the University of Zaragoza, and in 1994, was made an honorary professor at the University of Peking. He received the UCI Medal in 2002 and has been a member of the American Philosophical Society since 2004.
Now a Distinguished Professor emeritus, Miller currently resides on Deer Isle, Maine in the Penobscot Bay, where he is an avid sailor, and published his latest work in 2012.
