Kayvan Tahmasebian

Kayvan Tahmasebian is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Global Literary Theory project at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. He was the principal investigator of TRANSMODERN (Untranslatable Modernity: Literary Theory from Europe to Iran), a project funded by the European Commission under Marie Sklowdowska-Curie Actions (University of Birmingham, 2019-2021). Tahmasebian has also worked as an Ouseley Short-term Fellow at the Warburg Institute (2022) and as a Bahari Visiting Fellow in the Persian Arts of the Book at the Bodleian Library (2022).

His research interests include comparative poetics, literary theory, literary translation studies, textual materialism, and Persian modernism. As an ONGC Visiting Fellow, he is working on a monograph about the genesis of Maktubāt (Kamāl-al-dawle Maktublaṛĭ) by Azerbaijani writer Mirza Fathʿali Akhundzada. His research offers a textual materialist perspective on the evolution of critique in Akhundzada’s work, which goes hand in hand with his philosophical materialism.