Stanford University Press recently called J. Hillis Miller "the single most significant North American literary critic of the twentieth century." Professor Miller has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University and the University of California at Irvine, and is a past president of the Modern Languages Association and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work covers a wide range of literary texts, with a focus on Victorian and early twentieth-century English and American fiction and poetry. The question of reading is a central concern throughout his work, particularly in its ethical and cultural dimensions. Hillis Miller is one of the central figures through whom Anglophonic literary studies met with the concerns of continental philosophy, from his earlier work on Georges Poulet and the phenomenology of the Geneva School, to his later engagements with the work of Jacques Derrida.

Hillis Miller's many books include The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (1987); Illustration (1994), an investigation of cultural studies and the roles of technology in scholarship; Reading Narrative (1998), which begins from the question of "how to make sense of stories or how to identify the ways they may fail to make sense" to derive a theory of narrative; Black Holes (1999) examines changes to the contemporary research university in the West since the Cold War; Others (2001), which investigates the ways in which the literary text is haunted by an otherness which can be glimpsed only through the practices of careful close reading that are the hallmark of Miller's work; On Literature (2002), and the question of why it is that we respond in such complex ways to the imaginary worlds of fiction; and Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (2005), in which speech act theory and the work of Jacques Derrida in the context of James's fiction. Journals for which Hillis Miller is a member of the editorial board include Modern Language Notes, College English, Victorian Studies, ELH, PMLA, Diacritics, The Georgia Review, Genre, and The Oxford Literary Review.