“The Scale of Global Modernisms”
Harsha Ram
Associate Professor, Comparative Literature & Slavic Languages and Literatures
Wednesday, September 13, 12:00-1:30pm
Cal Design Lab, Wurster 494, Wurster Hall
Harsha Ram of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures will be presenting to the Colloquium a recently published article of his on literary modernism, comparative modernities and urban studies. The article is, in part, based on more than a decade of research on Tbilisi, formerly Tiflis, the colonial administrative center of Russian Transcaucasia until the revolutions of 1917 and the former and current capital of Georgia. It is related to City of Crossroads: Tiflis Modernism and the Russian-Georgian Enouncter, Ram’s soon-to-be-published account of the politics and poetics of crosscultural interaction between Russian and Georgian writers, poets and artists located in Tbilisi during the Russian revolution, and an account of the popular culture of the city, from street minstrelsy to the festive culture of the working classes, as it evolved during the colonial era.
Ram completed his undergraduate studies in Russian and Italian literatures in Australia and his doctoral degree in Comparative Literature at Yale University. He has been teaching at U.C. Berkeley since 1995. His interests include Russian and European romanticism and modernism, theories of world literature, East/West encounters, the cultural and political history of Russia-Eurasia, postcolonial studies, urban studies, and theories of nationalism, imperialism and cosmopolitanism.
In 2015, Ram taught a GUH graduate seminar with Mia Fuller entitled “World Literature and the Modern and Contemporary City.”