Khadem, Amir

Amir Khadem was a postdoctoral fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) at the University of Toronto from 2017 to 2019. He was a recipient of the 2018 Governor General’s Gold Medal and, in the same year, the Charles Bernheimer Prize for best doctoral dissertation from the American Comparative Literature Association. A former Mellon postdoctoral fellow, Khadem not only made strides in his academic and journalistic work at the JHI, but he also reached a vast community of people with his highly popular Persian-language podcast, Reading Ferdowsi—a cultural phenomenon that racked up more than two million downloads in one year.

Khadem is a scholar of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, with a particular focus on the histories of violence and their communal remembrance, remediation and reconciliation. At the JHI, he also produced an English-language podcast about the contemporary Muslim experience called A Curious Muslim and taught in the Department of English, University of Toronto at Scarborough, and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in the Faculty of Arts and Science at U of T.