Dr. Erik Liddell
Associate Director of EKU Honors
Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology
Chautauqua Lecture Series Coordinator
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Contact Information
Department: EKU Honors Program
Office: University 137
Mailing Address: University 137
Email: erik.liddell@eku.edu
Phone: 859-622-2267
Office Hours: By appointment only
Bio
Erik Liddell is associate professor of Comparative Humanities, associate director of the Honors Program, and coordinator of the university’s distinguished Chautauqua Lecture Series.
After completing a Liberal Studies degree based on the Great Books tradition at Brock University (Ontario, Canada), Erik earned his M.A and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto, where he took courses in French, Latin, Critical Theory, Early Modern Literature, Drama, Postmodernism, Fictional Worlds and Narratology, and where he wrote a dissertation on Augustine, Rousseau and Proust.
Prior to arriving at EKU in 2009, Erik taught at several other universities, in Ontario, Georgia and Nova Scotia. His scholarly interests, which remain very broadly interdisciplinary, include aesthetics, critical theory, the study of narrative, adaptation and translation studies, Latin literature, the Classical age, Early Modern Culture, especially French Renaissance and Enlightenment studies and the work of Marcel Proust. He has presented and published work on writers and thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Goethe, authored the first English translations of essays by Emilie du Châtelet and Alexandro Malaspina, and contributed a number of translations to the Collaborative Translation Project of the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert. Erik has taught study abroad in Italy with the KIIS Program, is a member of the Phi Kappa Phi Honors Society and is on the editorial board of the interdisciplinary Lincoln Humanities Journal.
Erik is currently coordinating and teaching the Honors Thesis Seminar. His other teaching in Honors includes Rhetoric, Opera as Cultural Drama, Revolutions in the Arts: the Avant-Garde, The Golden Ages of Athens and Rome, Love and Politics from Renaissance to Revolution, and Modernity and Global Humanities.
In his free time, Erik enjoys playing music (guitar, fiddle, trumpet, drums, and more). He fronts a local band and once upon a time was in an original indie alt-rock band that recorded and released both a cassette tape and a CD (!), receiving both college and national airplay in Canada, and doing some touring from Buffalo and Toronto to Ottawa and Montreal. He continues to experiment with songwriting and home recording, and he still loves to get out and play live. He also enjoys walking and hiking, and especially birdwatching. Erik regularly participates in Cornell University’s E-Bird programs such as the Great Backyard Bird Count, and he spent one spring as a volunteer with the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas, identifying 104 different species of mating pairs in a 100 square kilometer area of the Niagara Peninsula.