Rebecca Ruth Gould is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, SOAS University of London. She works at the intersection of politics and poetics across a wide geography that encompasses the Middle East and the Caucasus. She is the author of Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2023), The Persian Prison Poem(Edinburgh UP, 2021), and 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. With Malaka Shwaikh, she is the author of Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine: A Strategic Perspective (International Center on Nonviolent Conflict Research Monograph Series, 2023).
Her scholarly articles have received many awards, including the 2025 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize, the International Society for Intellectual History’s Charles Schmitt Prize, the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages Association’s Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship, and 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).
She has written for the general public in The London Review of Books, Middle East Eye, The New Arab, The Nation, and Jacobin. Her writing has been translated into Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Amharic, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, and Serbian. Her fiction and poetry have been widely published and her short story collection Strangers (2025) was translated into Arabic by Saleh Razzouk (2023).
The Translatability of Love: The Romance Genre and the Prismatic Reception of Jane Eyre in Twentieth-Century Iran
Tahmasebian, Kayvan and Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2023). In: Reynolds, Matthew, (ed.), Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel across Languages. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, pp 451-491
Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2019). In: Rihani, May A., (eds.) and Dravis, Michael W., (eds.), College Park, MD: University of Maryland. The Khalil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace, pp 125-136
Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2016). In: Gould, Rebecca Ruth, (ed.), Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp 202-230
Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2016). In: Gould, Rebecca Ruth, (ed.), Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp 231-248
Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2016). In: Gould, Rebecca Ruth, (ed.), Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp 1-32
Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2016). In: Gould, Rebecca Ruth, (ed.), Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp 33-91
Regulating Rebellion: Miracles, Insurgency, and Daghestani Modernity
Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2016). In: Gould, Rebecca Ruth, (ed.), Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp 92-157
Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2012). In: Norris, Stephen M., (eds.) and Sunderland, Willard, (eds.), Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp 117-127
Language Dreamers: Race and the Politics of Etymology in the Caucasus
Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2008). In: Grant, Bruce, (eds.) and Yalcin-Heckmann, Lale, (eds.), Caucasus paradigms : anthropologies, histories and the making of a world area. Münster: Lit Verlag, pp 143-166
