Harsha Ram teaches in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures. He is affiliated with the Department of Italian Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. He has B.A. Honours degrees in Russian and Italian literatures from the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney respectively, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University.

His teaching and research interests include Russian and comparative European romanticism and modernism; the European avant-garde; Russian poetry; early Soviet culture; Georgian literature; modern Indian literature; Italian literature; literary and aesthetic theory, comparative poetics, genre theory, and literary history; aesthetics, politics and comparative modernities; theories of world literature; the cultural and political history of Russia, the Caucasus and Eurasia; postcolonial studies; theories of nationalism, imperialism and cosmopolitanism; literature and the city, urban studies.

His is the author of The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (2003), and numerous articles in the field of comparative modernisms and romanticisms, world literature, genre history, urban studies, and Russian postcolonial studies. His forthcoming book is entitled The Scale of Culture: City, Nation, Empire and the Russian-Georgian Encounter.