Professor Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Ruth Gould is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her creative and critical practice explores the poetics of politics and the politics of poetry.

She is the author of Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2023), The Persian Prison Poem (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Writers and Rebels: The Literatures of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale UP, 2016), which won the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies and the best book of the year award from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. Her book length translations encompass the Georgian poet Vazha Pshavela (2019), the Indo-Persian poet Hasan Sijzi (2016), and the Georgian writer Alexandre Qazbegi (2015). With Kayvan Tahmasebian, she has translated the Iranian poets Bijan Elahi (2019) and Hasan Alizadeh (2022) and co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (2020).

Her scholarly articles, published in venues such as History & Theory, Comparative Literature, Comparative Studies in Society & History, Jurisprudence, The Translator, and Philosophy & Literature, have received awards ranging from the International Society for Intellectual History’s Charles Schmitt Prize to the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages Association’s Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship to the British Association of American Studies’ Arthur Miller Centre Essay Prize.

Gould has been awarded over £1.4 million in external funding from the European Research Council, the British Academy, the British Library, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and has held external fellowships with the Van Leer Institute (Jerusalem), Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Studies (Budapest), and the Forum for Transregional Studies (Berlin).

Her work broadly traverses literary, political and legal theory, with a particular emphasis on the literatures of the Islamic world and the Caucasus, in Persian, Georgian, Arabic, and Russian. She has written for the general public in The London Review of Books, Middle East Eye, The New Arab, and Jacobin. Her writing has been translated into Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Amharic, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, and Serbian. Her short story collection Strangers in Love has been translated into Arabic by Saleh Razzouk (Basra, Iraq: al-Hajjan Press, 2023).

Her current book project is Sex and the State: Marriage and the Origins of Gender Inequality (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

• Rebecca R. Gould