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Ken Seigneurie
Director, World Literature Program
BSc, BA (Michigan State University), MA (University of Michigan), PhD (University of Michigan)
Email: kseigneu@sfu.ca
Ken Seigneurie researches modern Arabic, French and British fiction, literary theory and the history of humanist thought . His edited volume, Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative, was published in 2003. Articles and chapters on Arabic Literature include:
- "Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon." Fordham University Press. (2011).
- “The Wrench and the Ratchet: Cultural Mediation in a Contemporary Liberation Struggle.” Public Culture. 21.2 (2009).
- “Anointing with Rubble: Ruins in the Lebanese War Novel.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. 28.1 (2008).
- “Ongoing War and Arab Humanism.” Geomodernisms: “Race,” Modernism, Modernity, eds. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005.
- “The Importance of Being Kawabata: The Narratee in Today’s Literature of Commitment.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 34:1 (Winter 2004).
Dr Seigneurie's most recent book, Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanese Culture, appeared in 2011 from Fordham University Press.
Assistant Professor
BA (University of Victoria), MA (University of Victoria), PhD (University of Sussex)
Tel: 778.782.7498, Office: SUR 5180
Email: scolby@sfu.ca
Sasha Colby teaches literature, theory, modernist art, and performance. She is author of Stratified Modernism: The Poetics of Excavation from Gautier to Olson (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), an interdisciplinary study about modernist literature and archaeology 1850-1950. Sasha has written six plays for community based performance and has toured her literary play about modernist poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) internationally. Her current work unites traditional scholarship with artistic inquiry by tracing the role of rehearsal and performance practices in the work of modernist poets.
Read Sasha Colby's article "The Literary Archaeologies of Théophile Gautier", as published in Comparative Literature and Culture.
Melek Ortabasi teaches modern literature, film, and the theory and practice of translation; s he specializes in Japanese literature and culture. Her research interests include cultural studies, comparative folklore studies, children’s literature, and film and popular culture in contemporary Japan. Some of Ortabasi's articles have appeared in the books Japanese Visual Culture, A Century of Popular Culture in Japan, and the Encyclopedia of Life Writing. Her co-edited anthology of literary translations, The Modern Murasaki: Women Writers of Meiji Japan, was published by the University of Columbia Press in 2006. Her book The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio is forthcoming from Harvard University Asia Center. Inspired by Yanagita’s interest in children and education, a topic she examines in her book, she is starting a new project on children’s literature and translation.
Assistant Professor
BA, MA, PhD (University of California, Berkley)
Tel: 778.782.8761, Office: SUR 5174
Email: azadeh_yamini-hamedani@sfu.ca
Azadeh Yamini-Hamedani's teaching interests involve interconnections of literature and philosophy, with particular emphasis on the semiotics of translation. Her current research includes Goethe's conception of World Literature in light of his reading of Hafez. She also explores Nietzsche's understanding of Zoroastrianism as it appears in his notations and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Limited Term Lecturer
BA, MA, PhD (University of Alberta)
Tel: 778.782.9368, Office: SUR 5172
Lindsay Parker has studied ancient through modern history and literature, as well as languages at the University of Alberta (BA, MA and PhD). In World Literature, she primarily teaches 19th and 20th century modern works, including literatures of the Mediterranean, Scandinavia, and South America. Lindsay has broad interests in critical theory with a focus on science and technology studies and the history of critical thought. She most recently co-edited Theodore Stephanides’ Autumn Gleanings and is currently a collaborator in the University of Victoria’s Modernist Versions Project.
Sessional Instructors
Spring 2012
María Ignacia Barraza
BA (Simon Fraser University), MA, PhD (Summa cum laude, University of Salamanca)
María Ignacia Barraza’s areas of research include Spanish peninsular literature (especially the Spanish Literary Generations of ‘98 and of ‘27), Latin American prose, as well as film and the visual arts. Her forthcoming articles deal with the relation between literature and the visual arts, as well as the aesthetics of the grotesque in the works of several of the authors of the Generation of 1898.
Jerry Zaslove
BA (Case Western Reserve University), PhD (University of Washington)
Professor Emeritus, Humanities and English; Simons Chair, Graduate Liberal Studies
Email: Zaslove@sfu.ca
Jerry Zaslove teaches Humanities and Comparative Literature at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, since 1965. Currently, Simons Chair in Graduate Liberal Studies; Founding Director of the Institute for the Humanities. Has written on social radicalism and the arts, theory of the novel, literacy, German-speaking Exiles in America; most recent publications are: “Talking Through: This Space Around Four Pictures by Jeff Wall” (with Glen Lowry); “The Last Snapshot of the Vancouver Intelligentsia”; “The Photograph and Posthumous Memory”; “An Open Letter to the Exile, Siegfried Kracauer”;” Kafka in the Penal Colony”; “W.G. Sebald”; “An Open Letter to the Roy Miki Generation of Poets”; “Dead Speech, Universities and the Art of Cynicism (forthcoming).