Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Law, Florida International University, Floersheimer Professor of Law at Cardozo law School, Emeritus Professor of English and Law, Duke University, and Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Distinguished Professor of English, Criminal Justice and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (1959) and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University (1960; 1962). He has previously taught at the University of California at Berkeley (1962-74); Johns Hopkins University (1974-85), where he was the Kenan Professor of English and Humanities; and Duke University, where he was Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law (1985-1998). From 1993 through 1998 he served as Executive Director of the Duke University Press. He is the author of John Skelton’s Poetry (1965); Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967 and a Thirtieth Anniversary Edition in 1997); Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (1972); The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (1978); Is There a Text in This Class? Interpretive Communities and the Sources of Authority (1980); Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989); There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too (1994); Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995); The Trouble with Principle (1999); How Milton Works (2001); Save the World on Your Own Time (2008), The Fugitive in Flight (2011), How to Write a Sentence (2011), Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others (2012). Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (2014). The Stanley Fish Reader, edited by H. Aram Veeser, was published in 1999.In 2011, Fish was the recipient of the Wilbur Cross Medal for lifetime achievement from the Yale University Graduate School. In 2014, Michael Robertson published a full length analysis of Fish’s work (Cambridge University Press). A biography of Fish is scheduled to be published in 2016. In recent years, Dean Fish has appeared in the following media venues: MacNeil/Lehrer, The McLaughlin Show, Firing Line, CNN, Hardball with Chris Matthews, CSPAN, Think-Tank, Larry King, Judy Jarvis, Laura Ingrahm,, the Brian Lehrer Show, many NPR stations, The O’Reilly Factor , Pacifica Radio, NBC Nightly News. Stories and features about him include The New.York Times Magazine Profile (1993), Chicago Tribune Magazine cover story (1999), The Chronicle of Higher Education cover story (2000), and a New Yorker Magazine profile (2001). In 2003, the Chicago Tribune named Dean Fish Chicagoan of the Year for Culture. In the past thirty years, there have been some two hundred articles, books, parts of books, dissertations, review articles, etc., devoted to his work. An archive has been established at the University of California, Irvine Library for the collection of his papers, correspondence, files, tapes, etc. Seven book-length studies have been devoted to his work. For three and one half years Dean Fish wrote a monthly column for the Chronicle of Higher Education under the rubrics “All In The Game”. From 2006 to 2013, Dean Fish was an on-line columnist for the New York Times. He has been a contributor to the Times op-ed page since 1995.