Apocalyptic Playland

Michelle Langford is Associate Professor in film studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Langford’s most recent research project looks at the German films of the Iranian filmmaker Sohrab Shahid Saless. Her newest book is Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2019). In this talk, Langford will provide […]

Dr. Farangis Ghaderi is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies at Jagiellonian University, Kraków. She obtained her Ph.D. in Kurdish Studies from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies of the University of Exeter in 2016 and […]

Hamid Naficy is a leading authority in cultural studies of diaspora, exile, and postcolonial cinemas and media, and of Iranian and Middle Eastern cinemas and media. In this lecture, Naficy discusses Iranian cinema and the way it has been used to challenge the Iranian state’s broadcasting monopoly and monovocalism. According to this conception, cinema is […]

Bio: Fatemeh Keshavarz-Karamustafa, born and raised in the city of Shiraz, completed her studies in Shiraz University, and University of London. She taught at Washington University in St. Louis for over twenty years where she chaired the Dept. of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from 2004 to 2011. In 2012, Keshavarz joined the […]

Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad is a research associate at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His publications have focused on Iranian cinema and media. His monograph, The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic (Routledge, 2010), is ground-breaking in its ethnographic engagement with the question of media audiences […]

Kamran Talattof received his Ph.D. from The University of Michigan in 1996, and he has been teaching at the University of Arizona since 1999 after teaching at Princeton University for three years. He is currently a full professor for the Department of Near Eastern Studies while holding an affiliation with the Department of Gender and […]

Laudan Nooshin is Professor of Music at City, University London, UK. She is an active researcher working in the broad field of Iranian music and sound studies. She has published books and articles on Iranian classical, popular and film music, and is currently writing a volume on the sounds of Tehran (supported by a Fellowship […]

Professor Asghar Seyed-Gohrab is the new chair of Iranian and Persian studies at Utrecht University. Central to Seyed-Gohrab’s research is the study of medieval Persian poetry (both secular and religious) and its reception in the modern world, examining how medieval poetry, mystical concepts, and philosophical notions are deployed in modern Iranian politics, in popular culture, […]

Pedram Partovi, an associate professor of history at American University, is a historian of the medieval and modern Muslim world. His current research focuses on the history of youth movements and their role in creating and disrupting the political order in Iran and the wider Middle East. He previously held a visiting professor position in […]

Farzaneh Milani completed her graduate studies in comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Forugh Farrokhzad: A Feminist Perspective,” is a critical study of the poetry of a pioneering Iranian poet. A past president of the Association of Middle Eastern Women Studies in America, Milani was the recipient of an All […]