
Robert Frank, Trolley – New Orleans, The Americans (1959)
My literary essays are listed below in chronological order. These are organized by theme on the drop-down menu under “Politics.” Many of my essays can also be viewed on Muckrack
2018 “Jim Crow in Jerusalem,” Litro Magazine 170 (special issue on segregation): 29-36.
2018 (co-authored with Shamil Shikhaliev) “A Tale of Two Scholars: The intellectuals who changed the face of learning in early 20th-century Daghestan,” History Today (in proofs).
2016 “Misremembering Chekhov,” Bacopa Literary Review 2016 (Gainesville: Writers Alliance of Gainesville), 153-157. * Reprint in LitMag Online
2016 “An Iranian Tsvetaeva,” Kenyon Review Online.
2016 “Two Stories from a Cosmopolitan Caucasus,” Transitions Online.
2016 “Hasan Sijzi and the Persian Ghazal,” The Sufi Journal 90 (Winter 2016): 46-51.
2015 “An Anthropology of Literary Culture,” (syllabus co-designed with Bernard Bate, Yale-NUS College), American Comparative Literature Association Report on the State of the Discipline of Comparative Literature, 2014-2015.
2014 “Tbilisi’s Persian and Arabic Pasts: 1501-1869,” IREX Scholar Research Brief.
2014 “On Palestinian Art” (on the Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata), MELA Notes: The Journal of the Middle East Librarians Association (86): 106-109. * Macedonian translation: “За Палестинската уметност” (trans. Kalina Maleska), Blesok: literatura i drugi umetnosti (Shine: Literature and Other Arts) 95 (2014). With revised English reprint.
2013 “Packing My Library: Benjaminian Fragments of a Peripatetic Life,” Kenyon Review Online.
2012 “Sergei Esenin’s Impressions from the Caucasus,” Xavier Review 32(1/2): 97-99.
2011 “Mahsatī of Ganja’s Wandering Quatrains” (intro. to translations of the 12th-cent Persian poet), Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 13 (2):225-7.
2011 “Niko Samedashvili’s Fleeting Moments” (introduction to my translations of the twentieth-century Georgian poet), Australia Association for Literary Translation Review 3: 34-35.
2010 “Landslide” (interview with daughter and granddaughter of the Georgian modernist poet Titsian Tabidze, d. 1937), Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics.
* Listed as a notable article on Arts & Letters Daily and The Fortnightly Review; “Top 25 Guernica Article for 2010”; reprinted in The Georgian Daily (6 August 2010).
2009 “The Twilight of Georgian Literary Modernism,” Metamorphoses: Journal of the Five-College Seminar on Literary Translation 17 (1): 50-103. Editor, translator, & author of intro. for feature section.
2005 Monthly interviews on Georgian literary culture for Tbilisi newspaper Georgia Today:
- “Titsian Tabidze’s Life in Poetry”
- “A Deportation That Never Ended” (on the 61st anniversary of the Chechen deportation)
- “Remembering Nikoloz Baratashvili”
- “Tbilisi, Cultural Home to the Caucasus” (on the Mīrzā Fatḥ-ʿAlī Ākhūndzāda Museum)
- “Ioseb Grishashvili, A Renaissance Man in the Soviet Union”
- “The Caucasus, A Land of Dreams: Grigol Robakidze”
2004 “Boris Slutsky: 1919-1986” (biographical sketch of the dissident poet and commentary on my translation of his poem, “Key”) Portals: A Journal in Comparative Literature 2(1):64-70.
2003 “Nina Fedorova (1895-1985),” (on the oeuvre of an émigré novelist), Raintaxi 8 (2): 88-89.