(Comp Lit Luncheon) Levi Thompson (University of Texas at Austin) presents “Putting Middle Eastern Modernism Together”

Levi Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches a wide range of courses on Islam, Arabic literature, and Middle Eastern cultures, along with graduate seminars on Arabic poetry and modernity in the Middle East. Levi’s first book, Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry (published by Cambridge University Press in 2022), won the inaugural Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Middle Eastern Studies from the MLA. He has published articles in the journals College Literature, Journal of Arabic Literature, Philological Encounters, Middle Eastern Literatures, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, and Transnational Literature, along with several book chapters on the translation of Arabic, Persian poetry, and Arabic and Persian literature in comparative contexts.

Levi’s lecture will cover the theoretical conception of his forthcoming edited volume, the Cambridge History of Middle Eastern Modernism, which brings together scholars working across several Middle Eastern languages to comparatively explore the roots, development, and institution of modernism as a literary and aesthetic movement in the region. The talk will also include a few close readings of Arabic and Persian poetry that inform the volume’s theoretical foundations.