Peter Swirski


Peter Swirski is a Canadian scholar and literary critic featured in Canadian Who's Who. As a specialist in American literature and American Studies, he is the author of many books, including the prize-winning Ars Americana, Ars Politica and the staple of American popular culture studies From Lowbrow to Nobrow. His other studies include American Utopia and Social Engineering, American Political Fictions, American Utopia: Literature, Society, and the Human Use of Human Beings, and the digital-futurological bestseller From Literature to Biterature. He is also the leading scholar on the late writer and philosopher Stanisław Lem.

Life and career

Peter Swirski is Distinguished Visiting Professor and Honorary Professor at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China. Formerly he was a Professor and Research Director at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in Finland, Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Literature at Sun Yat-sen University, a Senior Research Associate at the University of Alberta, and an Honorary Professor in American literature at South China University of Technology. In the mid-1980s he worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He obtained his doctorate summa cum laude from McGill University in Montreal, in 1996. Subsequently, he was affiliated with the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta, and the University of Hong Kong.
Swirski's 2005 study of American popular and "nobrow" cultures, From Lowbrow to Nobrow, was followed up by several other books on "nobrow" literature, culture, and other forms of "artertainment" : American Crime Fiction, a collection of critical essays When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow: Popular Culture and the Rise of Nobrow, and The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style. His book Ars Americana, Ars Politica received a positive review from the Financial Times.

A number of his monographs, collections, as well as articles from the Times Literary Supplement to the MIT Technology Review and other venues deal with the analysis of the work of the writer and philosopher Stanislaw Lem.
In 2012 Ars Americana was the subject of Professor Swirski's plenary lecture at UNE's Institute for Global Humanities alongside Noam Chomsky and other speakers. In the summer and fall of 2013, he was a speaker at the 4th Philippine Literary festival in Manila, and a BBC World Service panelist at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. In March 2015, he was a keynoter at the Millennium International Documentary Film Festival in Brussels.

Books