HARSHA RAM, Associate Professor

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Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory and the Department of Italian Studies

Ph.D. , Yale University (Comparative Literature).
M.Phil, Yale University (Comparative Literature).
B.A. Honours, University of Sydney (Italian).
B.A. Honours, University of New South Wales (Russian)

 

Research and teaching interests:

The Russian and European Enlightenment, romanticism and modernism

Literary and political history of Georgia and the Caucasus region

Russian imperial history and post-colonial studies

Comparative modernisms and modernities
Theories of world literature
Literary and political theory

Geopoetics and the environmental humanities

Urban studies

Current book projects:

The Feast and the Sacrifice: Sovereign Rites, Symbolic Representations and the Georgian Social Imaginary

Literatures of the Russian-Georgian Encounter

Download all my publications here: https://berkeley.academia.edu/HarshaRAM

Books

    • The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Articles

Forthcoming:

  • “Place and Space: Imperial Modernisms and the Geopoetics of the Planetary: (E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Andrei Belyi’s Wind from the Caucasus).” Modernisms/modernity.

Published:

  • “Spatial Scale and the Urban Everyday: The Physiology as a Traveling Genre (Paris, St. Petersburg, Tiflis).” The Cambridge History of World Literature. Ed. Debjani Ganguly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021: 693-729.
  • “World Literature as World Revolution: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Zangezi and the Utopian Geopoetics of the Russian Avant-garde. Comintern Aesthetics. Eds. Amelia Glaser and Steven Lee. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2020: 31-80.
  • “From Menshevik to Bolshevik: The Legacies of Georgian Modernism” (Review Essay), Slavonic and East European Review, 98/1 (2020): 139-151.
  • “Modernism in the Caucasus.” Introduction and Annotated Translation from the Russian of two articles on Niko Pirosmani by Kirill Zdanevich and Grigol Robakidze.Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology. Eds. Stephen Ross and Alys Moody eds (London: Bloomsbury Modernist Archives, 2019), 225-239.
  • “K voprosu o poèticheskikh istochnikakh gruzinskogo tosta.” Rossiia Gruziia. Posle imperii. Sbornik statei. Eds. M. Lekke and E. Ckheidze. (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie: 2018) 163-183.
  • “The Scales of Global Modernism: Imperial, National, Regional, Local.” PMLA 131/5 (2016), 1372-1385.
  • “Spatializing the Sign: The Futurist Eurasianisms of Roman Jakobson and Velimir Khlebnikov.” Between Europe and Asia. The Origins, Theories and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism. Eds. Mark Bassin, Sergey Glebov and Marlène Laruelle (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 137-149.
  • “The Literary Origins of the Georgian Feast. The Cosmopolitan Poetics of a National Ritual,” Ab Imperio (4/2014), 19-50.
  • “Introducing Georgian Modernism;” and “Decadent Nationalism, ‘Peripheral’ Modernism: The Georgian Literary Manifesto between Symbolism and the Avant-garde,” Special Cluster on Georgian Modernism including two manifestos by P’aolo Iashvili and T’itsian T’abidze, translated by Shota Papava and Harsha Ram, annotated by Harsha Ram. Modernism/Modernity, 21/1 (January 2014), 283-359.
  • “Futurist Geographies: Centre, Periphery, and the Struggle for
    Aesthetic Autonomy: Paris, Italy, Russia, 1909-1914.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Ed. Mark Wollaeger. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 313-340.
  • “Russian Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism. Ed. Pericles Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 113-135.
  • “Masks of the Poet, Myths of the People: The Performance of Individuality and Nationhood in Georgian and Russian Modernism.” Slavic Review 67, no.3 (Fall 2008), 567-590.
  • ” ‘Vam’ (1909): Interpreting an early lyric by Velimir Khlebnikov.” Sankirtos, Studies in Russian and Eastern European Literature, Society and Culture in Honor of Tomas Venclova. Eds. Robert Bird, Lazar Fleishman and Fedor Poljakov, Frankfurt: Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften (2008): 77-93.
  • “Andrei Belyi i Gruziia: Gruzinskii modernizm I pereosmyslenie peterburgskogo teksta v periferiinom prostranstve,” Andrei Belyi v izmeniaiushchemsia mire: k 125-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia. Ed. M.L. Spivak. Moscow: Nauka, 2008: 366-373.
  • “The Sonnet and the Mukhambazi: Genre Wars on the Edges of the Russian Empire,” Remapping Genres. PMLA 122/5 (October 2007): 1548-1570.
  • “Towards a Crosscultural Poetics of the Contact Zone: Romantic, Modernist and Soviet Intertextualities in Boris Pasternak’s translations of T’itsian T’abidze.” Comparative Literature 59/1 (Winter 2007): 63-89.
  • “From ‘Petersburg’ to ‘Petrograd’: The Creative History of a Georgian Lyric Poem and its Russian Recreation by Boris Pasternak.” Eternity’s Hostage. Selected Papers from the Stanford International Conference on Boris Pasternak, May 2004. Ed. Lazar Fleishman. Stanford Slavic Studies, 31:1, Part 2 (2006): 356-374.
  • “Between 1917 and 1947: Postcoloniality and Russia-Eurasia,” Forum: Conference Debate, “Are We Postcolonial? Post-Soviet Space.” PMLA 121: 3 (May 2006), 831-833.
  • “Andrei Belyi and Georgia: Georgian Modernism and the Reception of the ‘Petersburg text’ in Peripheral Space.” Russian Literature, 58 (2005): 243-276.
  • “Pushkin and the Caucasus,” The Pushkin Handbook, ed. David M. Bethea, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, (2005): 379-402.
  • “Modernism on the Periphery. Literary Life in Postrevolutionary Tbilisi.” Review Essay of two books by Tat’iana Nikol’skaia. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5,2 (Spring 2004): 367-382.
  • “Romantic Topography and the Dilemma of Empire: The Caucasus in the Dialogue of Georgian and Russian Poetry.” Coauthored with Zaza Shatirishvili, Russian Review, 63 (January 2004): 1-25
  • “‘Odinokii litsedei’ Velimira Khlebnikova,” Literaturnaia Gruziia, 1-6 (2002): 152-179.
  • “Velimir Chlebnikov’s ‘Odinokij licedej’.” Die Welt der Slaven 46 (2001): 331-346
  • “Imagining Eurasia: The Poetics and Ideology of Olzhas Suleimenov’s AZ i IA.” Slavic Review 60, 2 (Summer, 2001): 289-311.
  • “The Poetics of Eurasia: Velimir Khlebnikov between Empire and Revolution.” Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Madhavan K.Palat. Basingstoke: Palgrave Publishers, Ltd. 2001: 209-231
  • “Prisoners of the Caucasus: Literary Myths and Media Representations of the Chechen Conflict.” Berkeley Program in Soviet and post-Soviet Studies Working Papers Series. 1999: 1-29.
  • “Kavkazskie plenniki: Kul’turnye mify i medial’nye reprezentatsii v chechenskom konflikte.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 34, no.6 (1998): pp. 78-108.
  • “Russian Poetry and the Imperial Sublime.” Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation and the Culture of the Golden Age, ed. Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller Sally. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998: 21-49.