Bahodir Karim

Bahodir Karim (Bahodir Nurmetovich Karimov) was born on 7 February 1966 in the village of Toza-yormish in the Tashauz (Dashoguz) region of the Turkmen SSR, into an educated family; his father, Nurmat, was a physics teacher. He finished the village’s school No. 30 in 1983.

From 1986 to 1991 he studied at the Faculty of Uzbek Philology of Tashkent State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan) and from 1991 to 1994 was a postgraduate student there. In 1995, under Academician Bakhtiyor Nazarov, he defended a candidate’s dissertation on the role of Vadud Mahmud in the literary criticism of the 1920s, and in 2002, with Professor Umarali Normatov as scientific consultant, a doctoral dissertation on the problem of interpretation in Uzbek literary studies of the twentieth century.

From 1999 he headed the Department of World Literature and Theory at the National University of Uzbekistan, was dean of the Faculty of Uzbek Philology in 2003–2006 and from 2001 ran the university’s Higher Literary Courses. He is now a Doctor of Philology, professor and head of the Department of Literary Theory and the Contemporary Literary Process at Alisher Navoi Tashkent State University of Uzbek Language and Literature.

His research concerns mainly twentieth-century Uzbek literature, the legacy of the Jadids, the methodology of literary studies and hermeneutics. He is the author of books on Abdulla Qodiriy, Cho‘lpon and the Jadid critic Vadud Mahmud and the compiler of anthologies of twentieth-century Uzbek short stories and poetry; according to the university he has published over 450 scholarly articles and supervised two doctors of science and dozens of candidates and PhDs.

He has been a member of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan since 2005. In 2016 he received the badge “Excellent Worker of Public Education”, and in 2020 the honorary title “Honoured Youth Mentor of Uzbekistan”.