Harsha Ram

Harsha Ram's first book, The Imperial Sublime (2003) addressed the relationship between poetic genre, aesthetic theory, territorial space and political power in eighteenth- and early nineeteenth-century Russian literature. His recent publications chiefly concern Russian-Georgian and Russian-Italian literary relations in the context of theories of world literature and comparative modernisms. His forthcoming book, City of Crossroads. Tiflis Modernism and the Russian-Georgian Encounter, seeks to provide a historical account of cultural relations between Georgian and Russian artists and writers during the imperial and early Soviet eras, while at the same time offering a site-specific case study of how a "peripheral" city on the margins of multiple regional systems negotiated the challenges of historical modernity and aesthetic modernism. His third book project concerns the Russian contribution to the theory and practice of World Literature, from the theoretical insights of Aleksandr Veselovskii to the utopian geopoetics of Velimir Khlebnikov to the institutional ramifications of Soviet literature as a multiethnic project.