UCI professor honored

J. Hillis Miller, a distinguished research professor of English at UC Irvine, will receive the Modern Language Assn. of America’s lifetime achievement award this month.

An influential literary critic and pioneer of American deconstructionist theory, Miller is only the fourth recipient of the award since its inception in 1996. He will accept the honor at the Modern Language Assn.’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 28.

“This is a wonderful honor -- and an unexpected one,” Miller said in a news release. “It is especially pleasant to receive an award for having done for 50 years what I most like to do, that is, teach and write about literature.”

Miller, 77, has been a UCI professor since the mid-1980s and has written dozens of books on classic and modern literature, which have been translated into numerous languages. This year, he published “Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James” and has also penned extensive works on Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and others.

Miller, born in Virginia, graduated from Oberlin College and Harvard University in the 1940s. Before coming to UCI, he served as a professor at Johns Hopkins University and Yale University. In addition to his academic work, Miller was president of the Modern Language Assn. in 1986, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recently joined the American Philosophical Society.

Miller’s career as an author and educator spans more than 50 years.

“When you talk about lifetime achievement, I can’t think of anyone more deserving than J. Hillis Miller,” said humanities dean Karen Lawrence. “He has the unique combination of being a critic and thinker but also one of the most generous colleagues and mentors. You feel good when someone like that is rewarded for their life’s work.”

The Modern Language Assn., which promotes literary and linguistic studies, has more than 30,000 members in the United States and abroad. Previous winners of the lifetime achievement award are Yale University professor Maynard Mack, Columbia University professor Carolyn Heilbrun and University of Illinois professor A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff.