Peter Swirski

Peter Swirski
Peter Swirski interviewed for European TV, 2009.
Born	February 27, 1966
Nationality	Canadian
Occupation	Scholar, Literary Critic, Author

Peter Swirski is a Canadian scholar and literary critic featured in Canadian Who's Who (2011). Specialist in American literature and American Studies, he is the author of twelve books, including the National Book Award nominated Ars Americana, Ars Politica (2010) and the staple of American popular culture studies From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005). Some of his other studies include American Utopia and Social Engineering (2011), Literature, Analytically Speaking (2010), History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature (2009) and Of Literature and Knowledge (2007).

Life and career

Peter Swirski is currently Professor and Research Director ^[1] at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (Finland) and Professor of American literature and culture ^[2] at the Department of English, University of Missouri—St.Louis. He is also Honorary Professor in American Studies at Jinan University and Honorary Professor in American literature at South China University of Technology, and was previously Honorary Professor of American Literature at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He has written twelve books and almost a hundred articles on American literature, culture, history, politics, and society, as well as on American popular and “nobrow” culture and film. His research interests and publications also extend to interdisciplinary studies in literature and science, philosophy, aesthetics, and literary Darwinism^[3]. He is the world's foremost scholar on the late writer and philosopher, Stanislaw Lem.^[4]

Born in Europe, in the 1980s he worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC). He obtained his doctorate summa cum laude from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in 1996. Subsequently he taught at the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta, and the University of Hong Kong. In 2003 he was nationally honoured for his teaching in the annual Guide to Canadian Universities (Favourite Professor).^[5] For years he has also volunteered with children, in the 1990s at Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital and in the 2000s in Hong Kong's Causeway Bay Social Centre and subsequently at the Kau Yan Kindergarten and Primary School^[6] where he held the position of English Enrichment Program Director.

Swirski’s study of American popular and "nobrow" cultures, From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005) has gone through several reprints and is by now a staple in popular culture studies, while his Ars Americana, Ars Politica (2010) garnered positive reviews from a number of sources, including Howard Zinn^[7] and the Financial Times.^[8]

Several of his books deal with the analysis of the work of the late writer and philosopher Stanislaw Lem.^[9]

Bibliography

Books

War on Errorism: American Literary and Political Fictions (forthcoming)
American Nobrow: The Making of a Literary Culture (2014).
Lemography: Stanislaw Lem In the Eyes of the World (2014)
Lem, Turing, Darwin: Explorations in Computer Literature, Philosophy of Mind, and Cultural Evolution (2013)
Lem--Polemics: Essays, Letters, Provocation (2012)
American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History (2011)
Ars Americana, Ars Politica: Partisan Expression in Contemporary American Literature and Culture (2010)
Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution (Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture) (2010)
I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature (2009)
Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory (2007)
All Roads Lead to the American City (2007)
The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem (2006)
From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005)
Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge (2000)
A Stanislaw Lem Reader (Rethinking Theory Series) (1997)

References

External links

Livestream Plenary Address at the Center for Global Humanities, USA (2012)

Ars Americana, Ars Politica: American Democracy and Its Deficits

Columns by Swirski

You-ropean Democracy or American Dumbocracy? in Helsinki Times

Other

Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Home page at UMSL
Letter of Appreciation from students at the University of Helsinki "Yliopistlainen, p4-5"
Honorary lecture, South China University of Technology "Who Is Writing or Rewriting American literary history"
HUB interviews HUB 2-2011 p44-45
European Television Interviews Peter Swirski