Personal information

Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, Anthropology of Literature, Islam, Literary Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Caucasus, Central Asia
United Kingdom

Biography

Rebecca Ruth Gould is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics at SOAS University of London. She specializes in the literatures of the Persian and Islamic world in a comparative context. Her first monograph, entitled Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (2016) is published by Yale University Press. Together with her dissertation on the classical Persian prison poem (currently being revised as a book under the title The Persian Genre of Incarceration: Prisons and the Literary Imagination), these two book projects delineate poetry's ways of engaging with, resisting, and channeling the state's power from the medieval period to modernity, and across multiple Islamic geographies.

In addition to her scholarship on Persian, Arabic, Russian, and Georgian literatures past and present, Rebecca maintains an active interest in the intersections of anthropology, comparative literature, and social theory. Her essays on these subjects have appeared recently in Telos, Social Text, Comparative Literature Studies, Philosophy & Literature, Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Islamic Studies, and The Journal of Literary Theory.

Activities

Employment (3)

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London: London, GB

2023 to present | Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics (School of Languages, Culture and Linguistics)
Employment
Source: Self-asserted source
Rebecca Ruth Gould

University of Birmingham: Birmingham, Birmingham, GB

2017 to 2023 | Professor, Islamic World and Comparative Literature (School of Languages, Cultures, Art History & Music)
Employment
Source: Self-asserted source
Rebecca Ruth Gould

University of Bristol: Bristol, Bristol, GB

2015 to 2017 | Reader in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature (School of Modern Languages)
Employment
Source: Self-asserted source
Rebecca Ruth Gould

Education and qualifications (1)

Columbia University: New York, NY, US

2007 to 2013 | PhD (Middle East, South Asian, & African Studies)
Education
Source: Self-asserted source
Rebecca Ruth Gould

Funding (2)

"Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures Compared"

2017 to 2023 | Grant
H2020 European Research Council (Brussels, GB)
GRANT_NUMBER: 759346
Source: Self-asserted source
Rebecca Ruth Gould

Digitising Dagestan's Manuscript Heritage: Manuscripts from the Library of 'Alī al-Ghumūqī (1878-1943)