Harsha Ram is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and is also affiliated with the Department of Italian Culture and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Ram is the author of The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), and his forthcoming book, The Scale of Culture: City, Nation, Empire and the Russian-Georgian Encounter seeks to provide a historical account of cultural relations between Georgian and Russian artists and writers during the imperial and early Soviet eras.
The move to diversify art historical narratives is often accompanied by a search for commonalities. Instead addressing a need to acknowledge radical difference and untranslatability, each presenter in this panel approached the question of the incommensurable, interrogating tensions between a global approach and site-specific study.
