Rebecca Ruth Gould is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, SOAS University of London. She works at the intersection of politics and poetics across a wide geography that encompasses the Middle East and the Caucasus.
She is the author of Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2023), The Persian Prison Poem (Edinburgh UP, 2021), and Writers and Rebels: The Literatures of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale UP, 2016), which won the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies and the best book of the year award from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. With Malaka Shwaikh, she is the author of Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine: A Strategic Perspective (International Center on Nonviolent Conflict Research Monograph Series, 2023).
She is currently working on famine and food security in the context of the Gaza genocide, as well as on a family history of the genocide with The Lighthouse Collective in Gaza.
She is the editor, author, and publisher of The Textual Materialist. She edits Global Literary Theory, a publication that features writings from The Palestine Writers Workshop. She also runs the Poetry & Protest channel on YouTube.
Her scholarly articles have received many awards, including the 2025 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize, the International Society for Intellectual History’s Charles Schmitt Prize, the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages Association’s Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship, and the British Association of American Studies’ Arthur Miller Centre Essay Prize.
Gould has been awarded over £1.4 million in external funding from the European Research Council, the British Academy, the British Library, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and has held external fellowships with the Van Leer Institute (Jerusalem), Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Studies (Budapest), and the Forum for Transregional Studies (Berlin).
She has written for the general public in The London Review of Books, Middle East Eye, The New Arab, The Nation, and Jacobin. Her writing has been translated into Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Amharic, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, and Serbian. Her fiction and poetry have been widely published and her short story collection Strangers (2025) was translated into Arabic by Saleh Razzouk (2023).
End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
Reduce inequality within and among countries
Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
