Two Types of Cosmopolitanism
Reserve Your Seat
Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on April 24, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Galin Tihanov. Moderated by Valentina Izmirlieva.
In the introductory part of this talk Galin Tihanov explores various meanings of the word “cosmopolitanism” and attempts to attain finer granularity within what has long been taken to be a homogenous discourse. In the second part, he discusses the complex relationship (often also divergence) between two types of cosmopolitanism – political and cultural – that he identifies in the introductory part. Tihanov will do so by analyzing a set of examples drawn from the work of Central and East-European writers and intellectuals in exile who exemplify the struggles of cosmopolitans left without a polis. What is at stake here is a deeper understanding of cosmopolitanism, both as a desideratum but also as a discourse that harbors inner contradictions.
Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is also the PI for the project STRASYN (
Theorizing (Sub)peripheries: Strategies of Synchronization in Southeast European Literary and Cultural Criticism;
https://grants.ulbsibiu.ro/strasyn/), hosted by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu.
Tihanov has held visiting professorships at universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. He is the author of six books, including “The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond” (Stanford UP, 2019) which won the 2020 AATSEEL Book Prize for “best book in literary studies”. “World Literature in the Soviet Union” (ASP, 2023), of which Tihanov is the lead editor, received the 2024 AATSEEL Book Prize for “best edited multi-author scholarly volume”. Tihanov has been elected to the British Academy (2021) and to Academia Europaea (2012). He serves on the Executive Board of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University and as Honorary Scientific Advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures, CASS, Beijing, as well as on the advisory boards of universities and foundations in the United States, China, Germany, and other countries. He is also Past President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. His current work is on world literature, cosmopolitanism, and exile.
