Ken Seigneurie

Areas of interest

Comparative literature and liberal thought and religion.

Education

• PhD, Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
• MA, Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
• BA, English Literature, Michigan State University
• BA, Biology/Zoology, Michigan State University

Biography

Ken Seigneurie is Professor of World Literature at SFU. Most recently, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the six-volume "Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature," selected as a 2021 PROSE Finalist for “Single and Multivolume Reference, & Textbooks in the Humanities.” In 2015 his translation from Arabic of Rashid al-Daif’s ‘Awdat al-almānī ila rushdih appeared in, "What Makes a Man? Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin" from the University of Texas Press. In 2011 a monograph, "Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon," was published by Fordham University Press. He has published articles in numerous journals including: "Comparative Literature Studies," the "Journal of Arabic Literature," "Public Culture" and "Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East." In 2003 his edited book appeared, "Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative" with Reichert Verlag. Prior to coming to SFU, he lived and worked in Lebanon for thirteen years. In 2017 he returned for one year to Beirut to serve as Edward Said Chair in American Studies at the American University of Beirut. He began his career in the 1980s as a Paris-based journalist specializing in human rights in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He is currently working on a book-length project in Comparative Literature on mid-twentieth-century novelistic responses to the crisis of liberal thought. Focal points for the project include Egyptian, French and Anglo-American literatures, liberal thought and religion.