Galin Tihanov, PhD (Sofia), DPhil (Oxon); FBA, MAE

Profile

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of five books, most recently The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019) which won the 2020 AATSEEL Prize for "Best Book in Literary Studies". His co-edited volume A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond (2011) won the 2012 Efim Etkind Prize. His work in intellectual history and on cosmopolitanism, world literature, and exile has been widely translated. He is currently completing Cosmopolitanism: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford UP.  Peking UP is preparing a volume of his selected articles on cosmopolitanism, exile, and world literature in Chinese translation. Tihanov has been elected to the British Academy and to Academia Europaea.

World Literature as a Construct: Spaces of Dissent

'World Literature' in Soviet Russia

Two Types of Cosmopolitanism

On Migration, Exile, and the Resistance to Theory

On World Literature, Exile and Cosmopolitanism: An Interview with Professor Galin Tihanov [PDF 1,470KB]

Research

Research Interests:

Comparative Literature and Cultural History, esp. Russian, German, and Central- and East-European Culture and Thought (19^th-20^th c.) and German, Russian, Bulgarian and Polish literatures in their relation to intellectual and cultural history (19^th-20^th c.); Intellectual History; World Literature; Continental, British, and American Literary and Cultural Theory; Cosmopolitanism and its Genealogies; Exile and Migration (esp. 20^th century Central- and East-European exile); Construction of European Identities; Marxism and Post-Marxism; Mikhail Bakhtin; Olga Freidenberg; The Russian Formalists; Gustav Shpet; Boris Yarkho; Osip Mandelstam; Boris Porshnev; German Post-Romanticism; German Conservatism (esp. 20^th century); May ’68; Goethe; Dilthey; Simmel; Heidegger; Carl Schmitt; Oswald Spengler; Ernst Jünger; Robert Musil; Hermann Broch; Elias Canetti; Heiner Müller; Alexandre Kojève; Russian avant-garde visual culture.