Academic Bio
Samuel Hodgkin is a doctoral candidate in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He studies modern and early modern Persian and Turkic literature, and the cultural history of the Middle East and Central Eurasia. His work focuses on canon formation, genre and translation studies, and the history of literary institutions. His dissertation is entitled “Lāhūtī: Persian Poetry in the Making of the Literary International, 1906-1957.” In it, he examines the functions of the Persian canon within Soviet multinational and international literary institutions, and argues that in turn, these Soviet institutions shaped new roles for national literature and the anti-colonial writer in Iran and throughout the Persianate cosmopolis. He has published articles on Soviet stage adaptations of classical Turco-Persian romances and the modern relationship between Persian ghazal and Western lyric poetics. In 2017-18, he was a Mellon Humanities Fellow and an exchange scholar at Harvard University. This fall, he is completing his dissertation while teaching at Colgate University.