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 Feast and the Sacrifice: Sovereign Rites, Symbolic Representations and the Georgian Social Imaginary, examines literary and cinematic narratives of feasting alongside  multiple iterations of an obscure legend of human sacrifice as two symbolic poles of the Georgian social imaginary in its aspirations towards national sovereignty and social liberation. He is presently also working on a longer book, Literatures of the Russian-Georgian Encounter, which 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. Ram's published work can be downloaded from https://berkeley.academia.edu/HarshaRAM