J Hillis Miller has had a long and distinguished academic career, having taught for 19 years at Johns Hopkins University, followed by 14 years at Yale. Since 1986 he has taught at the University of California at Irvine, and is UCI Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature.

Miller has published extensively since 1952 on nineteenth and twentieth century literature and on literary theory, covering a very wide array of topics including history, politics, deconstruction, linguistics and speech-act theory. His early work inaugurated a long-standing concern with the effects of rhetoric and poetic language and the challenge that these pose to models of analysis proposing the idea of a totalizable literary comprehension or cognition. Working from a dialectical conception of literary indeterminacy since the earliest of his writings, most famously in his landmark study of the novels of Charles Dickens (Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels), Miller’s work would progress towards a prolific and productive encounter with theoretical developments over the last five decades, notably the contributions of Derrida and de Man, the latter a former colleague of Miller. His ongoing commitment to these developments is exemplified in his books, including Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), Black Holes, or Boustrophedonic Reading, co-authored by Manuel Asensi (Chicago: Stanford University Press, 1999), The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth Century Writers (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2000), Others (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), Speech Acts in Literature (Chicago: Stanford University Press, 2001). He is at work on a book on speech acts in Henry James's novels.