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 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, The Geopoetics of Sovereignty. Enlightenment, Romanticism and 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 early nineteenth centuries, focusing on how the Caucasus region has been mapped geopolitically as contested territory and geopoetically as a space of natural and ethnolinguistic diversity. His third book project, tentatively titled The Worlding of Russian Literature, will examine the interaction of Russian and world literatures during two crucial moments of transition and rupture: the 1840s, which saw the emergence of plebeian intellectuals and a new sense of the public sphere, and the 1920s, when the Russian avant-garde sought to reimagine the relationship between society and the written word. Ram's published work can be downloaded from https://berkeley.academia.edu/HarshaRAM