Position Title
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern/South Asian Studies
Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Persian Language and Literature
Director of Graduate Study for Comparative Literature
Comparative Literature Faculty Graduate Advisor
Education and Degree(s)
- Ph.D., Princeton University
- M.F.A., New York University
- B.A., Pomona College
Profile
I was trained at Princeton University as a Persianist and comparatist, and spent the first decade of my academic career at the American University in Cairo (AUC) during a particularly turbulent period in Egypt's history. Living and teaching in Cairo deepened my long-standing interests in the Arab literary tradition and its connections not only to Persian, and sharpened my sense of how both these literary traditions are more broadly connected to other world literatures. Now based in California—the state that is home to the largest group of diasporic Iranians in the US—I’m deeply interested in how Iranians both influence and are influenced by globalizing art and literary forms, and the role that Iranians living inside and outside of Iran play in such exchanges.
My first book, Burying the Beloved: Realism and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford University Press), examines how the discourses of civil law and prose fiction developed coevally and contributed to the reification of controversial gender norms in twentieth-century Iran. My second book is entitled Colorblind: Racial Thinking and Cultural Production in Iran and the Diaspora (forthcoming from Stanford University Press) and examines how racial thinking underpins cultural practices in Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Despite cultural traditions documenting racial difference, many have insisted that race does not exist in Iran. Instead, they prefer to believe that Iranian culture is “colorblind” and that the idea of being “Persian” binds all Iranians together. I argue that the word “Persian” in fact masks a long racial history that depends on the specter of blackness to define what is truly Iranian, and examine how these concepts express themselves in folklore, ethnography, literature, scholarship, and films, showing how understandings of race and slavery have moved from home country to host, and from host to home.
I am currently working on a project entitled Brad Pitt’s Tattoo, which examines contemporary and historical Iranian cultural production in sites of Iranian cultural dispersion and immigration before and after the 1979 revolution, including the Americas, Sweden, France, the Persian Gulf, and Malaysia.
During the pandemic, I created a podcast called "The Story of Iran" as a venue for sharing stories about Iran and the Persianate world, primarily through the lens of objects--large and small--that express aspects of this world's history and identities. You can listen to the podcast here: https://complit.ucdavis.edu/the-story-of-iran. If you have a story you’d like to share about Iran, please reach out to me. I’d love to talk with you!
I am an affiliated faculty member with the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives in the Social Sciences and Humanities at UC Davis and a member of the Diversity Scholars Network.
Selected Publications
Books
Colorblind: Racial Thinking and Cultural Production in Iran and the Diaspora (forthcoming from Stanford University Press)
Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Fiction and Reform in Modern Iran. Stanford University Press, 2012.
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
"Looking for the History of Modern Slavery in Iran in Memoirs by Contemporary Women Writers." Modern Iranian Women's Literature: Writing Across Borders and Genres, ed. by Nima Naghibi, Laetitia Nanquette, Marie Ostby, and Nasrin Rahimieh. Forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press.
“The Purloined Letter: Revisiting Simin Daneshvar’s Translation of The Scarlet Letter and its Critics.” Iran and World Literature, ed. by Mostafa Abedinifard, Omid Azadibougar, and Amirhossein Vafa. Bloomsbury Press, 2021.
“'Now It's Your Turn to See': Jafar Panahi’s Cinematic Intervention in Human Rights Discourse.” Performing Iran: Cultural Identity and Theatrical Performance, ed. by Babak Rahimi. I.B. Tauris, 2021.
“Translating Race: Simin Daneshvar’s Negotiation of Blackness.” Iran Namag 5.3 (2020):46-66.
“Black Light, White Revolution: Translation, Adaptation, and Appropriation in Galway Kinnell’s Cold War Writings on Iran.” Comparative American Studies 13.4 (2015): 220-235.
“Autobiography and Authority in the Writings of the Iranian Diaspora.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME) 31.2 (2011): 411-424.
Translations
"The First Day" by Goli Taraghi. World Literature Today. Nov-Dec 2018.
The Space Between Us by Zoya Pirzad. OneWorld Press, 2014.
Special Journal Issue
Guest Editor, New Paradigms in the Study of Middle Eastern Literatures (Alif 35: 2015).