Fellow 2025-2026 Kayvan Tahmasebian
Kayvan Tahmasebian is a writer, translator, and researcher in comparative literary theory and criticism. He is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Global Literary Theory project at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
From 2019 to 2021, he led TRANSMODERN (Untranslatable Modernity: Literary Theory from Europe to Iran), a European Commission-funded project under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions at the University of Birmingham. Tahmasebian has also worked as an Ouseley Short-Term Fellow at the Warburg Institute (2022), a Bahari Visiting Fellow in the Persian Arts of the Book at the Bodleian Library (2022), and an Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre Visiting Fellow (2024). His research spans comparative poetics, literary theory, literary translation studies, textual materialism, and Persian modernism, with articles appearing in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Critical Studies, Comparative Literature, Translation Review, Twentieth Century Literature, The Translator, Representations, New Literary History, Modernism/modernity, and Journal of Medieval Worlds.
He is the author of Mouldinalia (Tehran: Goman, 2016) and Lecture on Fear and Other Poems (Radical Paper Press, 2019). With Rebecca Ruth Gould, he edited The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (2020). Their co-translations of modernist and classical Persian literature have won several awards, including the PEN Presents Award and the PEN Translates Award.