People

Smaro Kamboureli, Director

Smaro Kamboureli is Professor at the School of English and Theatre Studies (SETS), University of Guelph, and Canada Research Chair (CRC) Tier 1 in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature. Before joining the University of Guelph in August 2004, 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. A guest professor in Germany and India and the recipient of various research grants, she has lectured widely in Canada and overseas. Her publications include: in the second person (Longspoon 1985), a long prose poem that has been translated into Italian by Clara Antonucci, with a critical introduction by Eleonora Rao, in seconda persona (Palomar 2007); A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, co-edited with Shirley Neuman (NeWest 1986); On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem (U Toronto P 1991); and Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada (Oxford 2000), which received the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Criticism and has been reprinted, with a Preface by Imre Szeman, by Wilfrid Laurier UP (2009).

She has published two editions of an anthology of multicultural writing in English Canada, Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature and Making a Difference: Multicultural Literatures in English Canada (Oxford 1996 and 2006 respectively). 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. Recent titles in the series include Roy Miki’s In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing (2011), Erin Mouré’s My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice (2009), and Di Brandt’s So This Is the World & Here I Am in It (2007); earlier titles in that series include Daphne Marlatt’s Readings from the Labyrinth and Fred Wah’s Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity. Critical Writing 1984-1999 (2000).

She has also edited Roy K. Kiyooka’s posthumous Pacific Rim Letters, with an Afterword, and reissued, with corrections, his Transcanada Letters (both NeWest 2005). Her recent publications include: Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2007), co-edited with Roy Miki, the first volume in the new TransCanada series of books she has launched as the General Editor with Wilfrid Laurier UP; Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012), co-edited with Robert Zacharias; and Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, Ecology (Wilfrid Laurier UP, forthcoming), co-edited with Christl Verduyn. She initiated and organized the three TransCanada conferences–the first two in collaboration with Roy Miki, the third in collaboration with Christl Verduyn–that spearheaded the collaborative TransCanada Project. Other recent publications include Retooling the Humanities: The Culture of Research in Canadian Universities, co-edited with Daniel Coleman (U of Alberta P 2011) and Barbara Godard’s Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture, ed. (NeWest 2008). She was the 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) for her editing of Roy Miki’s In Flux. Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace, a collection of interviews with Canadian novelists and poets that she conducted with Kit Dobson, is forthcoming (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2013).

Her CRC in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature (2005-2012) has recently been renewed for another seven-year term. With the support of her CRC and a Canada Foundation for Innovation grant, she founded TransCanada Institute in 2007. The author of many articles and chapters in books, she is currently working on the topics of diaspora and humanitarian narratives.