Samuel Hodgkin

Samuel Hodgkin is a scholar of Persian, Turkic, and other Eurasian literatures, whose research deals with canon formation, translation, and genre from the 8th century to the present. His current book project, “World Literature in One Country: Representing Persian Poetry in the Communist East,” shows how the Soviet internationalist project of world literature emerged from sustained engagement between leftist writers of West and South Asia and state-sponsored writers of the multinational Soviet East, who drew on their shared Persianate literary training to articulate a postcolonial poetics of political representation. This project has been supported by the Mellon Foundation. He has also published articles on Soviet Eastern opera and the historical relationship between ghazal and lyric. Projects at an earlier stage of development deal with early New Persian verse as a Silk Road art form; occasionality, phenology, and comparative medieval spring lyric; the Bedilian style in Central Asian verse of the 18th-early 20th centuries; Turanism and the cultural history of the Khazar hypothesis; and the late works of Viktor Zhirmunsky.