Congratulations to Dr. Randy Allen Harris on being named University Professor, a prestigious designation that “recognizes exceptional scholarly achievement and international pre-eminence in a particular field or fields of knowledge”. Harris, a professor of English Language and Literature cross-appointed to Computer Science, is noted for the enthusiasm of his research and teaching. His departmental bio describes him as “toiling joyfully” throughout his career.
Working at the intersections of rhetoric, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and AI (Large Language Models), this interdisciplinary scholar is internationally recognized as a pre-eminent linguist and rhetorician, a leading figure in Rhetoric of Science and Computational Rhetoric and a pioneer in the field of voice interaction design. He is Director of The Rhetoricon Database Project.
In addition to holding the University Professor designation, Harris was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) in 2023, the highest honour an individual can achieve in the Arts, Social Sciences and Sciences. He has also received an Arts Award for Excellence in Research (2023), the University Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision (2019), and several Outstanding Performance Awards (2006, 2019 and 2023). His grants as Principal Investigator total over a million dollars. In 2021, he received a Cooperative Education and Experiential Learning Employer Impact Award, Research category, for his Rhetoricon project.
Harris has expressed his gratitude for the designation by spreading the honour around. “This recognition is both very gratifying and very humbling,” he says. “But there's no way I could have made the progress I have made, or had near as much fun, without the support of my colleagues at all levels—department, faculty, and university—or the inspiration of my students.”
photo credit: Alexander Jacobi