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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.