About

I am the author of Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), which was awarded the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies and the best book award by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies, and the translator of After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (Central European University Press, 2015).

I post video reviews of books I am reading on my YouTube channel.

My articles have received awards ranging from the International Society for Intellectual History’s Charles Schmitt Prize to the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages Association’s Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship. From 2018-2023, I am PI for the ERC-funded project, “Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures Compared.”  I have taught at Yale-NUS College, the University of Bristol, and University of Birmingham. Currently, I am Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics at SOAS, University of London.

Education

I completed my undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley in Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies (with a focus on Dostoevsky and Russian literature), before moving to Tbilisi, Georgia, where I learned Georgian (and began learning Persian) and conducted the research that was to become my first book. After two years of residence in Tbilisi, I entered the PhD program at Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Department for Middle East, South Asian, & African Studies, where I completed a dissertation on Persian prison poetry, which is currently a manuscript entitled The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination .

Work Shared in CORE

Books
Articles
Book chapters
Essays
Translations
Course material or learning objects
Syllabi
Blog Posts
Book reviews
Online publication
Sound recording-non musical
Podcast
Magazine section

Projects

Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures Compared 2018-2023 (on Twitter @balaghas)

Funding received:

* European Research Council, Starting Grant

 

The Obligation to Migrate: Forced Migration and Muslim Memory in the Caucasus (2014-present)

Funding received:

* Research Grant, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation 

* Yale-NUS Internal Grant

* Short-Term Fellowship, Jordan Center, New York University 

 

Digitising Daghestan’s Manuscript Heritage: Manuscripts from the Library of al-Ghumūqī (2016-present) Funding received:

* Melvin Seiden Award & Major Project Grant, British Library, Endangered Archives Programme

Memberships

I am developing a range of sites on HCommons, including: a site dedicated to my work, a site on my literary translations, on a forthcoming volume on translation and activism, a co-authored work on prison hunger strikes, a course on the jurisprudence of 9/11, the CFA for an upcoming workshop in Hyderabad, India, directed to scholars from the Global South, and the website for a major collaborative research project on Global Literary Theory from the Islamic world.

Rebecca Ruth Gould

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@rrgould

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