Kenneth Seigneurie

Areas of interest

Ken Seigneurie’s teaching explores how worlds -- humanistic, liberal, religious and postcolonial -- accrete around literary texts. His research spans English, Arabic and French literatures in a comparative context, world literature and Eastern Mediterranean cultures.

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS:
“Liberalism’s Other in Mid-20th Century Novels,” a book-length study of religious discourses in the mid-20th century Arabic, English, and French literatures of the Levant and Sub-Saharan Africa. For 2029.

Education

• BSc in Biology/Zoology
• BA in English Literature (Michigan State University)
• MA in Comparative Literature (University of Michigan)
• PhD in Comparative Literature (University of Michigan)

Biography

Ken Seigneurie is Professor of World Literature at SFU. His current project is a study of palimpsests of religious thought in literatures of liberalism. He has co-edited with Paula Karger the Wiley Blackwell A Concise Companion to World Literature (2026), and with Antranik Dakessian he co-edited How My Days Passed: An Armenian Picaresque (2024) by Hagop Der Balian and translated by Vatche Ghazarian, a first-person memoir of the 1915-16 Armenian Genocide. He also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature (2020), translator from Arabic in What Makes a Man? Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin (2015), and author of Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon (2011). His work has appeared in numerous edited collections as well as in Middle Eastern Literatures, The Journal of Arabic Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Public Culture, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.