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.
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.”
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.
“I've mostly just moved around in various scholarly fields, bringing them together in ways that seemed promising,” Harris notes, “managing to hit gold a few times. My current work is the most exciting of all. Linguistics and rhetoric have often travelled separate roads, but cognitive neuroscience explains how they intersect. In turn, rhetoric and linguistics explain the relation between language and thought. Understanding human thought has never been more important, as the differences between humans and machines seem superfically to be blurring more each day."”
photo credit: Alexander Jacobi
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.
Throughout his career, Harris has published eight books, including the forthcoming Figures and Constructions, as well as 62 journal articles (including four in 2025 alone), not to mention eight technical reports, 39 reviews, and 130 conference presentations, guest lectures, invited talks, keynotes, and plenaries. He has organized four international conferences, with a fifth one coming next month, Figuring Constructions, Constructing Figures.
“I am absolutely delighted to see Dr. Harris named University Professor,” said Dean Alexie Tcheuyap. “The breadth and impact of his research are unmistakable and stand as a shining example of the Faculty of Arts at Waterloo. His career powerfully demonstrates the remarkable possibilities and enduring strengths of interdisciplinary scholarship.”