| Lee Siegel | |
| Birth Date: | July 22, 1945 |
| Birth Place: | Los Angeles, California, US |
| Occupation: | professor, novelist |
| Genre: | fiction, campus novel |
Lee Albert Siegel (born July 22, 1945) 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.
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), as well as one from the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. In addition, Professor Siegel has been awarded 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 featured as a panelist at the 2018 Hawaii Book & Music Fair and the 2019 Asia Society Gala.
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]
He has two sons.
From 1978 until the late 1990s, Siegel published scholarly studies of Indian love poetry, comedy, horror, and magic. Many contain fictional elements.