2025 Recipient

Samuel Hodgkin

Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism

The University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, established in 2009 and sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies in the previous calendar year. 

Winner: Samuel Hodgkin, Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2024)  

A deeply erudite monograph, Samuel Hodgkin’s Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism excavates a largely neglected twentieth-century literary ecosystem that fundamentally decenters Soviet cultural history. With breathtaking scope and linguistic skill, Hodgkin explores a succession of texts, actors, and genres in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian. Focusing on the diverse ways in which leftist internationalists forged enduring transnational cultural, political, and linguistic solidarities across a vast geographical space that spanned West, Central, and South Asia and the Caucasus, Hodgkin analyzes how classical Persianate forms and rituals transcended national boundaries to form a cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism. Impressive in its scholarly rigor and intellectual subtlety, the book demonstrates how poetry, ritual, and translation functioned as shared vehicles for political imagination, cultural diplomacy, and revolutionary solidarity, drawing unexpected connections between figures as varied as Anna Akhmatova, Nazim Hikmet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and Abu al-Qasim Lahuti. Meticulously researched and richly illustrated with examples from both high classical and popular oral traditions, Hodgkin shows how Persianate genres were simultaneously modernized and mobilized within communist networks of writers’ unions, presses, and international gatherings. His close readings illuminate the complex entanglements of politics and poetics, revealing how forms of cultural expression could both reinforce and subvert Soviet power. At the same time, the book foregrounds the resilience of suppressed or marginalized elements of the Persianate canon, which reemerge in the post-Soviet era in strikingly subversive ways. With audacity and verve, Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism not only opens up multiple new avenues of research but also offers a compelling non-Eurocentric model for “worlding” literature—reshaping how we understand the global contours of literary modernity.

Honorable Mention: Xiaolu Ma

Prize Committee: Maria Taroutina (chair), Rory Finnin, and Jane Costlow