Imre Szeman was a Senator William McMaster Chair of Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, where he has taught since 1999. He is the recipient of the John Polanyi Prize in Literature (2000), Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award (2003), the Scotiabank-AUCC Award for Excellence in Internationalization (2004, for the Institute on Globalization), and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2005–7), among other awards. He is a co-founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies and a founding member of the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.). Szeman is co-editor of Cultural Spaces, a book series published by University of Toronto Press, as well as co- editor of the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Mediations.

Dr. Szeman’s main areas of research are in globalization, visual cultural studies, contemporary popular culture, postcolonial studies, and social and cultural theory. He is author of Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism and the Nation (2003) and co-author of Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (2004). He is also co-editor of Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture (2000), the second edition of the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2005), Global-Local Consumption (forthcoming 2008) and Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (forthcoming 2008).