About

Levi Thompson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic focus includes Arabic, Persian, modernism, and Cold War cultures. As a faculty member within the College of Liberal Arts, he contributes to the study and understanding of Middle Eastern languages and cultural histories, engaging students and advancing research in these areas.

Research topics

• Art
• Literature
• History
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Law
• Linguistics
• Ancient history
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time by Shaj Mathew (review)

  Modernism/modernity · 2026-01-01

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• SAMUEL HODGKIN. Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023). 296 pages. $110.00 cloth. ISBN 9781009411639. Also e-book ($110.00).

  Review of Middle East Studies · 2025-06-01

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• Shādhil Ṭāqah’s Elegy for Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb

  Journal of Arabic Literature · 2024-10-09

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  Abstract Iraqi poet and statesman Shādhil Ṭāqah (d. 1974) published an elegy in a 1965 issue of the Beirut journal al-Ādāb for fellow poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (d. 1964) titled “ Intiṣār Ayyūb ” (Job’s Victory). This article attends to how the elegy’s content reflects the poet’s relationship with Sayyāb as well as how it pays homage to Sayyāb’s novel approach to Arabic prosody. Outside of one book-length study of Ṭāqah’s poetry by Bushrā al-Bustānī (2010) and the comments found at the end of Ṭāqah’s collected works edited by Saʿd al-Bazzāz (1977), his poetry has remained relatively unaddressed even in Arabic scholarship. The study thus introduces a key poem from this important but mostly forgotten poet to Anglophone readers while also situating Ṭāqah as a member in the coterie of modernists who became active during and following their time at the Baghdad Teachers College in the late 1940s, a group that included Ṭāqah, Sayyāb, Nāzik al-Malāʾikah (d. 2007), ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī (d. 1999), and others. Overall, the article establishes Ṭāqah’s work within its Iraqi context as well as within the broader Arabic literary milieu of the 1960s in the Mashriq, situating Ṭāqah as an important contributor to the development of modernist Arabic poetry.

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• The Rebellion of Forms in Modern Persian Poetry: Politics of Poetic Experimentation. Farshad Sonboldel (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). 232 pages. $120. ISBN: 9788765103609

  Iranian Studies · 2024-10-01

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• The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures. C. Ceyhun Arslan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Pp. 248. $120.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781399525824

  International Journal Middle East Studies · 2024-08-01

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  The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures. C. Ceyhun Arslan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Pp. 248. $120.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781399525824 - Volume 56 Issue 3

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• Literary Modernism and Literary Modernity in the Middle East

  Comparative Literature Studies · 2024

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  • Literature
  • Art
  • History

  ABSTRACT This article puts Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity in conversation with Levi Thompson’s Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry to explore the relationship between literary modernism and literary modernity in non-Western literary contexts. It highlights the authors’ parallel theoretical engagements of Michel Foucault’s “attitude of modernity” and modernists’ and modernizers’ reworkings of literary heritage through the sublation of premodern literary content and form into modern conceptions of literary history. Drawing on these parallels, the article reviews several points of convergence in contemporary Arabic literary historical analysis that limn Jabbari’s approach to the Persianate world, which crosses between Persian and Urdu, the naskh and nastaʿlīq scripts, and Iran and India. It seeks out connections in the work and thought of Jabbari’s interlocutors, such as Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār and N. M. Rashed; Iranian modernist poets Nīmā Yūshīj, Aḥmad Shāmlū, and Furūgh Farrukhzād; and the Arab “free verse” (shiʿr ḥurr) poets such as ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb. The article highlights how Jabbari’s book proves that literary historians in the Persianate world were subject to modernization discourse in making themselves modern and therefore covered up aspects of their premodern heritage that did not fit their modernizing projects.

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• Lewis Awad Breaks Poetry's Back in Plutoland (1947)

  2023-11-30

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  Luwīs ʿAwaḍ (Lewis Awad, 1915–1990) published a bombshell poetic manifesto in 1947 called Blūtūlānd (Plutoland) that begins by challenging readers to “Break poetry’s back!” Awad lays out a revolutionary plan to refigure Arabic poetry, drawing on both European poetic developments and the history of Arabic literary criticism. Despite the revolutionary innovations Awad suggests in Plutoland, his contributions to modernist poetry in Arabic have found little recognition in the subsequent critical tradition. This study reinvestigates Plutoland through an analysis of Awad’s introduction, the poems in the collection, and other critical writing about the project.

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• A Formal Foundation for Comparative Study of the Late Persianate

  Philological Encounters · 2023-05-26 · 1 citations

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  Abstract This article addresses poetic form as a foundation bridging the literary contexts of Arabic and Persian that exists beyond the bounds of Euro-American influence. We find the originally Arabic science of ʿarūḍ , prosody, used in these two contexts to retool premodern poetic form for the modern era. Questions of form encourage us to think about how modernist poets writing in Persian and Arabic approach their poetry as a craft that emerges not out of engagements with Western literature but rather from a shared poetic past. By tracing formal links across Arabic and Persian, this article argues that paying attention to the premodern tradition of prosodic science they share helps us both to understand the early development of modernist poetry in each language and to avoid explanations informed mostly by literary critical frameworks used to study Western literatures.

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• Winter in the Modernist Garden

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-11-24

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  In this final chapter, I analyze Furūgh Farrukhzād’s innovative development of Nīmā’s earlier prosodic experiments and link Farrukhzād’s late modernist poetic project with Western modernist poetry. My purpose in avoiding lengthy comparisons with Western poetry up to this point in the book is to provincialize European poetic modernism and consider instead the significant links in poetic forms, themes, and politics that were more important for the elaboration of modernism in the Arab and Iranian contexts. However, I also readily admit that Western poetic influence plays a significant role in the Arab and Iranian modernists’ approaches to poetry. I thus take the opportunity in this last chapter to address Farrukhzād’s work not only in the context of local poetic connections, but also in light of the bonds she forged with Western modernist poetry. In so doing, I argue that Farrukhzād’s poetic persona is best understood as a flâneuse, the female Iranian counterpart to Charles Baudelaire’s Parisian poetic persona. I furthermore undertake a lengthy analysis of the close associations between Farrukhzād’s late poetry and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” from 1925.

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• Honoring Commitments

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-11-24

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  This chapter examines the courses modernist Arabic poetry took in Iraq following Sayyāb’s premature death in 1964. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī (d. 1999) was a well-known poetic rival of Sayyāb who remained affiliated with the Communist Party even after the difficulties Communists grappled with during the 1950s. As the decade went on, fallout from the Iranian coup was compounded by nearly-simultaneous revelations about the realities of Joseph Stalin’s authoritarian rule following his death in 1953. I focus on the existential crisis Bayātī faced when the hopeful possibilities of 1950s decolonization efforts became more and more limited in the face of rising totalitarianism in the Middle East. Despite the changing political situation in the region manifested in, for instance, the rise of the Iraqi Baath and the increasing authoritarianism of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime in Egypt, modernists continued to use the same techniques in the 1960s that their predecessors had employed two decades earlier. Specifically, like Nīmā before him, Bayātī uses another premodern Arabic poetic device – taḍmīn or “poetic quoting”– to sublate premodern traditions into modernist poetry.

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Frequent coauthors

• Elias G. Saba

  Grinnell College

  1 shared

• Emily Drumsta

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

  UCLA

  2017

• Fellow, Arabic

  Center for Arabic Study Abroad, University of Texas, Austin

  2011

• MA, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

  University of Pennsylvania

  2009