Randy Harris

I was born in the new hospital in Kitimat, BC, jaundiced, bald, underweight, and, quoting my father now, "ugly as sin." Understandably, nothing much happened after that until I found myself by sheer chance at the University of Lethbridge 20 years later, only to discover I was pretty good at schoolwork, something neither I nor anyone else had noticed up to that point. I transferred to Queens after two years, though it recognized only about half my courses, and none toward the major, so I ended up taking nothing but historically based English literature classes for the next two and a half years. The Victorian novels course alone almost killed me. I lived in the library. I loved it. There followed a string of different academic preoccupations, at a variety of institutions, as I dabbled in every passing fancy (literary theory, linguistics, professional communication, graphic design, rhetorical theory) over the next dozen years. But, miraculously, I was employable anyways, and I have been toiling joyfully at Waterloo ever since, still dabbling.

Editor, with Shelley Hulan and Murray McArthur. Literature, Rhetoric and Values: Selected Proceedings of a Conference held at the University of Waterloo, 3-5 June 2011. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

Editor. Rhetoric and Incommensurability. Parlor Press, 2005.

Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the New Conversational Interfaces. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2005.

Editor. Landmark Essays in Rhetoric of Science: Case Studies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997.

The Linguistics Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Second edition, 2012.

Acoustic Dimensions of Functor Comprehension in Broca's Aphasia. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1988.

"Rhetoric, incommensurability, and the curious case of David Brewster." Incommensurability 50, 3 June 12. National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.

"The return of the body." 20 March 10, Max Planck Institut fÅr Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, Germany.

"Cognitive rhetoric and the genesis of genetics." 10 January 07, Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.

"Two failed metaphors: Incommensurability does not obtain." 2 May 03, S. Michael Halloran Symposium, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.

"A new career path: Voice user interfaces and technical communication" 3 April 01, Southwestern Ontario chapter of the Society for Technical Communicators, Davis Centre, University of Waterloo, Waterloo ON.

"Linguistics, Usability, and Technical Communication." 1 April 95, Combined Toronto, Toronto-West, and Southwestern Ontario chapters of the Society for Technical Communication, The Old Mill Inn, Toronto, ON.

• SSHRC Standard Research Grant, "Cognitive Rhetoric;" University of Waterloo, 2010-2013
• MITACS/ACCELERATE Grant, "Large Inbox Voice Interaction"
• Outstanding Performance in Research Award; University of Waterloo, 2005
• Learning Initiatives Grant; University of Waterloo, 2005
• SSHRC Standard Research Grant, "Rhetoric and Incommensurability;" University of Waterloo, 2002-2004
• Izak Walton Killam Memorial Post-doctoral Fellowship; University of Alberta, 1990-92
• SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1985-87
• Sir James Lougheed Award of Distinction; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1985-87
• Rensselaer Scholar Fellowship; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1985-86
• Province of Alberta Scholarships; University of Alberta, 1982-83, 1983-84
• Izak Walton Killam Memorial Pre-doctoral Scholarship; Dalhousie University, 1980-81.

I am currently preoccupied with the way in which rhetorical figures reflect brain structure. (You want to remember a phone number? Repeat it over and over. Hey! That's ploche! You want to structure a list in the most cognitively efficient way? Arrange the phrases into parallel syntactic patterns. Hey! That's isocolon! You want to learn something new? Compare it to something you already know. Hey! That's metaphor!) This study, the study of the mental correlates of figuration and other other aspects of argumentation, aesthetics, and persuasion, is Cognitive Rhetoric.

• Rhetoric (especially cognitive rhetoric, rhetoric of science, history and theory of rhetoric);
• professional communication (especially document design, usability, and multimedia);
• interaction design (especially speech), and linguistics (especially cognitive linguistics and history of linguistics).