Lee Siegel (professor and novelist)

Lee Albert Siegel (born 1945, Los Angeles, California) is a novelist and professor emeritus of religion at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His 1999 novel, Love in a Dead Language, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year[1] and a bestseller in India.

Lee Siegel
Born (1945-07-22) July 22, 1945
Los Angeles, California
Occupationprofessor, novelist
NationalityUnited States
Genrefiction, campus novel

Life and career

Siegel studied comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley and fine arts at Columbia University. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford for a dissertation in the field of Sanskrit. He then was hired by the University of Hawaii as Professor of Religious Studies, where he has taught ever since.

In 1988 Siegel was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.[2] He has received numerous fellowships and grants including five Senior Research Fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Smithsonian Institution (1979, 1983, 1987, 1991, 1996), four research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (1982, 1985, 1987, 1990) and one from the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. In addition Professor Siegel has been two Presidential Awards for Excellence in Teaching (1986 and 1996). He has been a scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation, including two periods at its Bellagio Study Center (1990 and 2003). He also was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College of Oxford University (1997). In 2003, Siegel was featured in the television documentary series, Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour. Siegel has been an invited speaker at numerous literary and scholarly events as well. He was recently a featured as a panelist at the 2018 Hawaii Book & Music Fair and the 2019 Asia Society

Siegel has been called "one of the most difficult writers to locate on a map of contemporary American fiction."[3] Of Love in a Dead Language, a New York Times reviewer wrote that "while the novel's historical texts, both actual and imagined, give pleasure, they also tell an incisive history of Orientalism, Europeans' construction of Indian sexuality, the elision of exotic and erotic."[4]

His has two sons, Dmitri and Sebastian Siegel.

Scholarly works

From 1978 until the late 1990s, Siegel published scholarly studies of Indian love poetry, comedy, horror, and magic. These books include:

  • Sacred and Profane Dimensions of Love in Indian Traditions as Exemplified in the Gitagovinda of Jayadeva (Oxford University South Asian Studies Series)(1978)
  • Dream-symbolism in the sramanic tradition: two psychoanalytical studies in Jinist and Buddhist dream legends (with Jagdish P. Sharma) (1980)
  • Fires of Love, Waters of Peace in Indian Culture (1983)
  • Laughing Matters. Comic Tradition in India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987) ISBN 978-0-226-75691-2
  • Net of Magic. Wonders and Deceptions in India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991) ISBN 978-0-226-75687-5
  • City of Dreadful Night. A Story about Horror and the Macabre in India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995) ISBN 978-0-226-75689-9

Novels and other fictions

In 1999, Siegel published his first novel, Love in a Dead Language. It was named the New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

His fictional works are:

References
  1. https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/12/05/reviews/notable-fiction.html
  2. U.S. and Canadian Fellows, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fellows page, 1988
  3. "Anatomizing the Language of Love: An Interview with Lee Siegel | electronic book review". Retrieved 2020-06-23.
  4. "The Kama Sutra and Then Some". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2020-06-23.
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