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The Iranian Studies Initiative at UCSB and Farhang Foundation invite you to

Canon Making and Canon Breaking in the Caucasus:

Bakikhanov, Akhundzadeh, Talibov

a free live lecture event by Dr. Rebecca Ruth Gould

This event is a part of a lecture series on
Iranian Art and Literary Exchange Between Iran, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Russia in the 20th Century.
This series is co-organized by the Graduate Center for Literary Research, University of California, Santa Barbara and with the support of the Gramian-Emrani Foundation and Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Funds. 

 In this talk, I examine how Persianate writers from the Caucasus collectively constructed a Caucasus literary sensibility during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Focusing on the writings of Bakikhanov, Akhundzadeh, and Talibov, I consider how 19th and early 20th century writers from the Persianate Caucasus navigated between Iran and Russia in their writings, while developing a conception of literary identity that was distinctive to the Caucasus. Among the distinctive features of this literary sensibility is a cosmopolitan outlook that sees beyond national borders, a conception of literary history that includes Arabic and Turkic literatures as an intrinsic part of its literary history alongside Persian, and a cosmopolitan sensibility that relates to the Greek, Roman, Armenian, Georgian, and Russian histories of the Caucasus region as part of its own history. I argue that the cosmopolitan sensibility of Persianate writers from the Caucasus can be of service to our efforts to move beyond the nationalist narratives that affect this region—and our world—to this day.

About Dr. Rebecca Ruth Gould

Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of the award-winning Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2023).

She translates from Persian, Georgian, and Russian. Her most recent translation with Kayvan Tahmasebian, House Arrest: Poems of Hasan Alizadeh (Arc Publications, 2022), was awarded a PEN Translates Award from English PEN. She was poetry book reviewer for Harriet Books at the Poetry Foundation and teaches at the University of Birmingham in the UK.