Kayvan Tahmasebian is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at SOAS University of London. His research explores the intersections of Islamic literatures, translational modernities, and textual materialist aesthetics, with a regional focus on the Middle East. Bridging literary theory, intellectual history, and manuscript studies, his work interrogates how modernity is imagined, contested, and materialized across Islamic literary traditions.
A central strand of his research investigates Middle Eastern Modernism as a distinct poetico-political formation, with particular attention to the entanglements of aesthetics and politics in free verse, literary criticism, and literary translation. He is also interested in textual materialism in Islamic literary cultures including the letterist dimensions of classical Persian and Arabic poetics, exegesis, and philosophy, as well as the material forms of literary critique in twentieth-century Islamic literatures.
He is currently completing a monograph on the textual genesis of critique in the work of the nineteenth century Azerbaijani writer Mirza Fathali Akhundzadeh.
He is the author of Mouldinalia (Tehran: Goman, 2016), coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (2020), and cotranslator of High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi (The Operating System, 2019) and House Arrest: Poems of Hasan Alizadeh (Arc Publications, 2022).
He was the principal investigator of TRANSMODERN (Untranslatable Modernity: Literary Theory from Europe to Iran), a project funded by the European Commission under Marie Sklowdowska-Curie Actions (University of Birmingham, 2019-2021). Tahmasebian has also worked as an Ouseley Short-term Fellow at the Warburg Institute (2022) and as a Bahari Visiting Fellow in the Persian Arts of the Book at the Bodleian Library (2022).
