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Rebecca Ruth Gould

Distinguished Professor, Comparative Poetics & Global Politics, SOAS, University of London

I am Distinguished Professor, Comparative Poetics & Global Politics at SOAS, University of London. My creative and critical work engages with literature, anthropology, and political theory. Developing and current interests include global human rights, critiques of sovereignty, freedom of expression, and comparative legal cultures.

My books include Writers and Rebels: The Literatures of Insurgency in the Caucasus (2016), which was awarded the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies and the award for Best Book by a Woman 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 (2016), and The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (2015).

From 2018-2023, I am directing “Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures Compared,” funded by an ERC Starting Grant. I have received grants, awards, and fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University, the Future Philology project at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the American Historical Association, the American Philosophical Society, the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies, the Medieval Academy of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Van Leer Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem), and the American Literary Translators Association.

Experience

  • –present
    Reader in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, University of Bristol
  • 2017–present
    Professor, Islamic World and Comparative Literature, University of Birmingham

Education

  • 2013 
    Columbia University, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society

Publications

  • 2016
    Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus , Yale University Press

Grants and Contracts

  • 2018
    Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures Compared
    Role:
    PI
    Funding Source:
    European Research Council