Smaro Kamboureli

Biography

Smaro Kamboureli specializes in contemporary Canadian literature and criticism. Before joining the University of Toronto, she taught at the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph where she was Canada Research Chair (CRC) Tier 1 in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature. Her CRC research project included founding and directing the TransCanada Institute (www.transcanadas.ca), organizing three international and interdisciplinary TransCanada conferences, and initiating collaborative research on the methodologies and institutional structures and contexts that inform and shape the production, dissemination, teaching, and study of Canadian literature. Before moving to Guelph, she taught for many years at the University of Victoria where she served as Director of the English graduate program and as the first Associate Dean Research in the Humanities. The recipient of various research grants, she has had her work translated in Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, and Polish and she was a guest professor in Germany and India. On the Board of NeWest Press (Edmonton) and one of its in-house editors since 1981, she is the founder and editor of its series The Writer as Critic (https://newestpress.com/category/writer_as_critic) that has published such Canadian authors as Phyllis Webb, Roy Miki, Fred Wah, Erin Moure, Di Brandt, Daphne Marlatt, and George Bowering. She is also the founder and general editor of the TransCanada Series of books at Wilfrid Laurier University Press (http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Series/TC.shtml). Her book Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada received the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Criticism, and she was a finalist for the 2011 Lois Hole Award for Editorial Excellence (Book Publishers of Alberta Association) and Tom Fairley Award For Editorial Excellence (Editors’ Association of Canada). Her most recent publications include Writing the Foreign in Canadian Literature and Humanitarian Narratives, a University of Toronto Quarterly special issue that she guest-edited, with an Introduction under the same title (Volume 82, Number 2, Spring 2013). Smaro Kamboureli specializes in contemporary Canadian literature and criticism. Before joining the University of Toronto, she taught at the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph where she was Canada Research Chair (CRC) Tier 1 in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature. Her CRC research project included founding and directing the TransCanada Institute (www.transcanadas.ca), organizing three international and interdisciplinary TransCanada conferences, and initiating collaborative research on the methodologies and institutional structures and contexts that inform and shape the production, dissemination, teaching, and study of Canadian literature. Before moving to Guelph, she taught for many years at the University of Victoria where she served as Director of the English graduate program and as the first Associate Dean Research in the Humanities. The recipient of various research grants, she has had her work translated in Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, and Polish and she was a guest professor in Germany and India. On the Board of NeWest Press (Edmonton) and one of its in-house editors since 1981, she is the founder and editor of its series The Writer as Critic (https://newestpress.com/category/writer_as_critic) that has published such Canadian authors as Phyllis Webb, Roy Miki, Fred Wah, Erin Moure, Di Brandt, Daphne Marlatt, and George Bowering. She is also the founder and general editor of the TransCanada Series of books at Wilfrid Laurier University Press (http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Series/TC.shtml). Her book Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada received the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Criticism, and she was a finalist for the 2011 Lois Hole Award for Editorial Excellence (Book Publishers of Alberta Association) and Tom Fairley Award For Editorial Excellence (Editors’ Association of Canada). Her most recent publications include Writing the Foreign in Canadian Literature and Humanitarian Narratives, a University of Toronto Quarterly special issue that she guest-edited, with an Introduction under the same title (Volume 82, Number 2, Spring 2013).

Research Interest

Canadian Literature (fiction, poetry, criticism); Postcolonial and Diaspora Studies and Theory; Multiculturalism; Area Studies and Interdisciplinarity; Humanitarian Narratives; the Humanities.