Peter Swirski

Peter Swirski
Peter Swirski interviewed for European TV, 2009.
Born	(1966-02-27) February 27, 1966 (age 50)
Occupation	Author, Educator, Scholar, Literary Critic
Nationality	Canadian

Peter Swirski (born 1966) is a Canadian scholar and literary critic featured in Canadian Who's Who and Amazon's #1 Bestseller in American Literary History and Criticism and in Canadian Literary History and Criticism. Specialist in American literature and American Studies, he is the author of seventeen books, including the prize-winning Ars Americana, Ars Politica (2010) and the staple of American popular culture studies From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005). His other well-known studies include American Utopia and Social Engineering (2011), American Political Fictions (2015), and the digital-futurological bestseller From Literature to Biterature (2013). He is also the leading scholar on the late writer and philosopher Stanisław Lem.

Peter Swirski is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland, Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Literature at the Department of English, SYSU, Senior Research Associate at the Wirth Institute at the University of Alberta, Canada, and Honorary Professor at the American Studies Center at Jinan University. Formerly he was Professor and Research Director at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in Finland., Honorary Professor in American literature at South China University of Technology and Honorary Professor of American Literature at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He has written seventeen books and 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.

In the mid-1980s he worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He obtained his doctorate summa cum laude from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in 1996. Subsequently he was affiliated with 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). In 2013 former students at the University of Alberta founded a scholarship in literary studies in his name (the Faye Wong & Peter Swirski Prize for Literature). For years Professor Swirski has 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 Ebenezer School for the visually impaired and the Kau Yan Kindergarten and Primary School where he continues to hold the position of English Enrichment Program Director. In 2011-2012 he organized a book drive for China, shipping almost a ton of books donated by European libraries and individuals to various universities in Guangzhou, such as South China University of Technology.