Research Expertise and Interest

The Russian and European Enlightenment, Russian and European romanticism and modernism, Russian and European avant-gardes, Russian, European, Italian literature, Georgian history and literature, theories of world literature, literary theory, comparative poetics, genre theory, literary history, comparative modernisms and modernities, vernacular and high culture, cultural and political history of Russia-Eurasia and the Caucasus, postcolonial studies, theories of nationalism, imperialism and cosmopolitanism, urban studies, the city and literature.

Research Description

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 nineteenth-century Russian literature. His recent publications chiefly concern Russian-Georgian, Russian-French and Russian-Italian literary relations in the context of theories of world literature and comparative modernisms. His forthcoming book, The Geopoetics of Sovereignty. Literatures of the Russian-Georgian Encounter, seeks to provide a historical account of cultural relations between Georgian and Russian writers and intellectuals over the course of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries, tracing how the Caucasus region was mapped geopolitically as contested territory and geopoetically as a space of natural and ethnolinguistic diversity. A complimentary volume, titled City of Crossroads. Nineteenth-century Tiflis between Empire and Revolution, will examine the cultural production associated with the Georgian capital Tbilisi, from travel writing to the vernacular culture of the city's artisans to the writings of the Georgian modernists and the Russophone avant-garde. Ram's published work can be downloaded from https://berkeley.academia.edu/HarshaRAM