Lee Siegel (professor and novelist)


Lee Albert Siegel is a novelist and professor emeritus of religion at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His 1999 novel, , was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a bestseller in India.

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 . He has received numerous fellowships and grants including five Senior Research Fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Smithsonian Institution, four research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council and one from the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. In addition Professor Siegel has been two Presidential Awards for Excellence in Teaching. He has been a scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation, including two periods at its Bellagio Study Center. He also was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College of Oxford University. In 2003, Siegel was featured in the television documentary series, . Siegel has been an invited speaker at numerous literary and scholarly events as well. He was recently a featured as a panelist at the and the 2019 Asia Society
Siegel has been called "one of the most difficult writers to locate on a map of contemporary American fiction." 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."
His has two sons, Dmitri and.

Scholarly works

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