What do Iranians - both home and abroad - think of race? Does "blackness" exist in Iran? And what can we learn about race and slavery in Iran from folklore, ethnography, literature, and films? In this episode, Jacke talks to author Amy Motlagh about her book Colorblind: Racial Thinking and Cultural Production in Modern Iran and the Diaspora.
We are absolutely delighted to announce that our colleague Sven-Erik Rose's latest book, Making and Unmaking of Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos (Brandeis University Press, 2025) has won the Eva Reichmann Book Prize, awarded for the first time in 2026 to an outstanding book in the fields of Antisemitism Studies or Holocaust Studies. Warmest congratulations, Sven-Erik!
From late May to mid-June, 2026, Sheldon Lu conducted research and gave a series of lectures in Taipei, Taiwan, and several cities in China. He gave a keynote speech at the international conference “Celluloid Fabulation and Trans-Eat Asian Life” jointly organized by National Taiwan University and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taipei, Taiwan. He also gave lectures at Academia Sinica and Soochow University in Taipei.
We are delighted to share that Benjamin Fong will join Texas State University as an Assistant Professor of Global Cinema in the Department of English beginning in fall 2026.
Hello COM colleagues and students. I hope the first couple of weeks of the quarter have gone well for you. I am writing with a few announcements of recent achievements by members of our COM community.
School pride will be swelling among University of California, Davis, students as they start fall classes Wednesday (Sept. 24).
The campus tied for No. 9 among the nation’s top public universities and earned accolades for innovation, social mobility and more in the 2026 U.S. News Best Colleges rankings, published Monday (Sept. 22).
This is the fifth consecutive year the campus has been ranked among the media outlet’s top 10 public universities.
