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. 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." 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." He has two sons. ==Primarily nonfiction==