American Philosophical Society
Member History

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Resident[X]
Class
Subdivision
402. Criticism: Arts and Letters[X]
1Name:  Dr. Paul Alpers
 Institution:  University of California, Berkeley; Smith College
 Year Elected:  2004
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402. Criticism: Arts and Letters
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1932
 Death Date:  May 19, 2013
   
 
Paul Alpers was a distinguished literary historian and classicist, a master of the English, European and classical traditions, and an academic of the first rank. In his first book, The Poetry of the Faerie Queene, he showed himself to be "a learned and sensitive reader of Elizabethan poetry." He developed an original reading of Spenser's rhetorical modes, to which he returned in an important series of articles on narration. He next, as an extension of his work on Spenser, began to study the pastoral traditions. This resulted in an analysis and translation of Virgil's Eclogues and then What is Pastoral?, winner of the Christian Gauss Award. As Dr. Alpers traces the evolution of pastoral poetry from Theocritus and Virgil, through its great incarnations in the Renaissance, to its flowerings in modern literature, he has written what is arguably the definitive study of the subject, a work of exhaustive scholarship and literary intelligence. Dr. Alpers taught at the University of California, Berkeley beginning in 1961 and became Class of 1942 Professor of English Emeritus in 2000. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2004. Paul Alpers died May 19, 2013, at the age of 80 in Northampton, Massachusetts.
 
2Name:  Dr. J. Hillis Miller
 Institution:  University of California, Irvine
 Year Elected:  2004
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402. Criticism: Arts and Letters
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1928
 Death Date:  February 9, 2021
   
 
J. Hillis Miller taught for many years at the Johns Hopkins University and then at Yale University before moving in 1986 to the University of California, Irvine, where he was UCI Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emeritus. He was the author of many books and essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century English, European, and American literature, and on literary theory. His most recent books are Others (2001), Speech Acts in Literature (2002), On Literature (2002), and Zero Plus One (2003). His recent work includes a book on speech acts in the novels and stories of Henry James. A J. Hillis Miller Reader has also recently appeared from Edinburgh University Press and Stanford University Press. He died on February 9, 2021.
 
Election Year
2004[X]