Born: 1938.

Education: University of Pennsylvania, BA, 1959; Yale University, MA,

PhD 1962.

Fish was an early adopter of advanced literary theory. Before his earliest exposure to theory, in Paris in 1967, he had already established his position as a scholar (Renaissance literature and especially John Milton studies). He began teaching theory, and writing theoretically, by 1970; he was a founder of the School of Criticism and Theory. His interventions included reader response theory, new pragmatism and critical legal studies. Also influential were his combative defenses of theory and his attacks on interdisciplinarity, multiculturalism, and critique, otherwise known as suspicious reading. He was professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1962–74); Johns Hopkins University (1974–85); Duke University (professor of English and professor of law (1986–98)); Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; and Florida International University. He is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Publications

John Skelton's Poetry (1965), Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967), 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? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (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 (1999), The Trouble with Principle (1999), How Milton Works (2001), Save the World on Your Own Time (2008), The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism, and Law in a Classic TV Show (2010), How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One (2011), Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (2014), Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn't Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom (2016), and Think Again: Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education (2015).

Also influential were his articles in Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and Texas Law Review. The Stanley Fish Reader, edited by H. Aram Veeser, was published in 1999.