Before coming to Humanities Montana in February 2009, Ken Egan served as chair of the Department of English at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, where he began teaching in 2002. After receiving his B.A. at the University of Montana-Missoula and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he taught at Middlebury College in Vermont and Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana, where he was faculty chair and divisional chair of Arts and Humanities.
He served on the board of Humanities Montana during 1989-1992. Egan has received Fulbright grants to teach at the University of Athens and Comenius University in Slovakia. He has authored book-length critical studies of nineteenth-century American and Montana literature. In 2014 he published Montana 1864: Indians, Emigrants and Gold in the Territorial Year to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Montana Territory and raise funds for Humanities Montana.
In his six years of work with Humanities Montana, Egan has come to appreciate the challenges and joys of leading an independent nonprofit organization committed to providing humanities opportunities throughout a vast state.
He and his wife, Terry, have two sons, Devin and Brian, currently living in Las Vegas and Berlin, Germany.