Biography
I am a literary scholar and cultural historian of medieval and modern Eurasia. My research deals with literature and criticism written in prestige languages (Persian and Russian) and vernaculars (especially Turkic languages). I am interested in classical Persianate poetry and its afterlife in modernist literature and literary institutions across Central and South Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. I study and teach topics in genre and translation theory, canon formation, world literature, and historical poetics.
My first book, Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge University Press, December 2023), shows how the Soviet internationalist project of world literature emerged from sustained engagement between leftist writers of West and South Asia and state-sponsored writers of the multinational Soviet East, who drew on their shared Persianate literary training to articulate a postcolonial poetics of political representation. I have also published articles on lyric poetry, theater, anthologies, and translation practices in the modern Persianate zone. I am a co-organizer of the Cultures of World Socialism Working Group, and the editor of a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies based on our conversations entitled “Communist World Poetics” (2024). My own contribution to the issue discusses the institution of the national poet after the age of Romantic nationalism. I am also a published translator of poetry and literary criticism.