Sam Hodgkin Awarded USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies
The University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies in the previous calendar year.
A deeply erudite monograph, Samuel Hodgkin’s Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism excavates a largely neglected twentieth-century literary ecosystem that fundamentally decenters Soviet cultural history. With breathtaking scope and linguistic skill, Hodgkin explores a succession of texts, actors, and genres in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian. Focusing on the diverse ways in which leftist internationalists forged enduring transnational cultural, political, and linguistic solidarities across a vast geographical space that spanned West, Central, and South Asia and the Caucasus, Hodgkin analyzes how classical Persianate forms and rituals transcended national boundaries to form a cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism.
Read the full announcement here.
