Gregory Goulding

Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow

20232024 Forum on Revolution

Gregory Goulding

Assistant Professor, South Asia Studies

Gregory Goulding is an assistant professor in the department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests lie in the modern history of the literary cultures of northern South Asia. He is currently working on a series of research projects, including studies of modernism in Hindi, as well as a project looking at ideas of space and regionality in Central India. In addition to sources in Hindi, he works with texts in Marathi, Urdu, and English. Articles have been published or are forthcoming in journals including Comparative Literature, Modern Asian Studies, and The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

Cold War Genres: Local and International in Hindi Literary Culture, 1940–1980

Cold War Genres investigates the interplay between post-independence Hindi literature and Nehruvian India's internationalism during the early Cold War and non-aligned movement era. In this context, debates over realism and modernism are analyzed in terms of their influence on literary form across genre. The project reveals how literary form and experimentation with genre respond to the social and cultural contradictions of Nehruvian India and the challenges of literary realism within postcolonial literary modernity. The result, this project argues, was a transformation of literary genre as poetry engaged with problems of prose fiction. The project explores questions of genre and form across various literary cultures, contributing to our understanding of the literary history of the Cold War world.