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Introduction
I hold a PhD in English from the University of Canterbury. I am currently an Assistant Pro. of English Language and Literature at the University of Tehran, and Director of the University of Tehran Center for Foreign Languages.
My main areas of interest include (Neo)Orientalism, Postcolonialism, American Studies, Third World Feminism, Diaspora Studies, Contemporary Persian/Iranian Literature and Culture, Translation, Critical Literacy, Digital Humanities, and Discourse Analysis.
Additional affiliations
February 2017 - May 2021
January 2015 - January 2017
Education
September 2010 - November 2015
October 2006 - September 2009
Publications
Publications (41)
The advent of the 1979 Islamic Revolution made Iran and Islam dominant representational motifs in western media and literature. The preponderance of such representations revolved around the Iranian nation’s identification as a Shi‘ite Muslim-majority polity. As such, the Revolution’s trajectory and its landmark events – such as the 1979 Hostage Cri...
As far as literary representations of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the West are concerned, according to Farzaneh Milani, Betty Mahmoody's best-selling Not Without My Daughter (1987) remains " the most popular book ever published in the U.S. about Iran. " Nevertheless, the book's unprecedented popularity notwithstanding , it has garnered scant cr...
As far as literary representations of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the West are concerned, although Betty Mahmoody’s bestselling Not Without My Daughter (1987) has been called “the most popular book ever published in the US about Iran” [Milani, Farzaneh. 2008. “On Women’s Captivity in the Islamic World.” Middle East Report 38 (246): 40–46, 43],...
این کتاب شامل مقدمه مترجم و چهار مقاله از ادوارد سعید است که در میان سالهای ۱۹۷۹ تا ۱۹۸۱ در مطبوعات آمریکایی منتشر شدند. در این مقالات سعید عملکرد رسانههای آمریکایی در انعکاس اخبار مربوط به جهان اسلام، انقلاب اسلامی ایران و تسخیر سفارت آمریکا در تهران را تحلیل کرد. تمایز برداشتهای سعید از این وقایع در قیاس با دیگر تحلیلگران غربی و نقدش به رسانه...
This paper aims to offer a critical analysis of V. S. Naipaul’s second “Islamic” travelogue, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998), which chronicles the author’s “excursions” to the four non-Arab Muslim countries of Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. This critique is presented firstly through problematizing the...
This study offers a postcolonial ecocritical critique of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood (1977) in the context of the enduring socio-economic crises in postcolonial Kenya, exacerbated by the legacies of colonialism and the ongoing impact of neocolonial practices. In so doing, it investigates the novel's portrayal of resilience and trauma amidst...
Despite the many ethical and political ties between global social justice and ecological disaster, postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives have traditionally remained rather distinct. However, more recently, postcolonial ecocriticism has both broadened and connected these two viewpoints. In this light, this study examines the impact of colonizati...
Despite the fact that a significant number of Iranians have lived in or visited the United States for more than half a century, they have produced very few accounts of their lives in or visits to the country. In the last decade, however, a number of narratives of travel to the United States have been published by Iranian authors, of which professor...
Memoirs are one of the most popular literary genres today, and Iranian–American memoirs achieved particular prominence around the time of America’s “war on terror” and Iran’s designation as a member of Bush’s “axis of evil.” In Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran, Hossein Nazari examines three bestselling Iranian–American women’s memoirs, analyzin...
Hawthorne’s often-neglected tale, “The Seven Vagabonds” (1833), portrays one of the most significant instances of a vagabond’s way of life eventually materialized in literary pursuit. This paper examines the short story in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘carnival’, explicating how each vagabond arriving at the wagon offers some tantalizing gl...
The structuralist-inspired development of narrative theories in France from the late 1960s onward has spawned a whole host of opportunities to explore the way narratives function. This is precisely what Gerald Prince undertakes in his Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative , in which he delineates the mutual relationship between the nar...
This paper critiques Jasmin Darznik’s bestselling memoir, The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life (2011), in order to investigate the author’s literary response to mainstream, (neo-)Orientalist literary representations of Iranian women in the United States. In doing so, this study sets out to examine whether the narrative reinforces...
A review of "Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran
(Captivity, Neo-Orientalism, and Resistance in Iranian-American Life Writing" (Bloomsbury, 2022) published in The Journal of Iranian Studies
As a quintessentially postmodern territory, Paul Auster's fictional world is laden with suicidal doppelgangers, whom Auster employs in the third volume of his celebrated triptych The New York Trilogy, namely The Locked Room (1986), as a structuring device geared to echo a postmodern world of hermetically locked rooms. Despite the striking presence...
When Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran was first published in 2003, it was widely acclaimed as a narrative that exemplified the ‘oppression’ of Iranian/Muslim women in post-revolutionary Iran. More importantly, Western critics were quick to praise the text as a testament to the significance of teaching Western literature as a liberating medium...
Memoirs of diasporic Iranian-American authors are a unique and culturally powerful way in which Iran, its politics and people are understood in the USA and the rest of the world. This book offers an analysis of the processes of production, promotion, and reception of these representations of post-revolutionary Iran. The book provides new perspectiv...
Home is perhaps the most widely employed of settings in the
history of theatre. In fact, there might be few plays that do not
make use of home as the place where the events in the drama
transpire. Such prominent playwrights as Henrik Ibsen, Eugene
O’Neil, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, and Sam
Shepard have all made extensive use...
Art has always been closely intertwined with politics, and throughout history many artists have protested, both through their art and their political activism, against unjust political actions. In recent history, the Vietnam War era saw the rise of political art, a prime example of which could be observed in the proliferation of protest posters in...
This paper critiques the construction of the figure of American Eve and her transformation in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) vis-à-vis American and European socio-cultural norms. In so doing, this study argues how James’s own encounter, as an American expatriate, with the culture(s) of Europe shape his views on the role and position of...
The Internet and technologies have revolutionized the experience of reading and understanding literature. Since the audiences of literary works have changed, a change in the creation of literature seems inevitable. Because the writer should have their audience in mind at the moment of literary creation, they now have to change their perception of t...
In this chapter, we present a brief overview of the sociopolitical and educational context of Iran, followed by a review of the critical scholarship in the field of teaching English as a foreign language. We briefly highlight the lack of a critical literacy approach in Farsi education where critical practice mainly manifests itself in a rather excl...
Purpose: North Korea remains a country about which very little is known to the rest of the world. Most news and information on the country come from the country's state media, accounts penned by defectors, and narratives and documentaries produced predominantly by westerners. The paper aims to offer an interview with Reza Amirkhani, a prominent Ir...
The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has profoundly influenced and changed almost every facet of Iranians’ lives. In the normal scheme of things, some of these changes might have needed years of planning,
organisation, and preparation to take place. One of the areas that has been dramatically affected in the aftermath of the pandemic is the educat...
Eighteenth-century children’s authors implicitly exploited the fantastic and the improbable
aspects of fairy tales to complement the persuasiveness of their moralistic teachings. Whereas
the coexistence of chapbook residue with middle-class pedagogy in eighteenth-century children’s
books has already been underlined in scholarly studies, little crit...
«نیمدانگِ پیونگیانگ» روایت دو سفر امیرخانی به رازآلودهترین کشور دنیاست. جایی که نه تنها اینترنت و ماشین شخصی، که اصولا فردیت بیمعنی است؛ حزب کارگران جمهوری دموکراتیک خلق کره بر همه چیز مسلط است، و مردم باید رسما رهبر خود، و پدر و پدربزرگش را، پرستش کنند. هیچکدامِ اینها اما برای کسی که با کره شمالی کمی آشنایی داشته باشد تازگی ندارد. هزاران م...
Reza Amirkhani is a prominent Iranian novelist, travel writer, and cultural critic. He has won many literary awards in Iran and some of his works have been bestsellers. In this interview, Amirkhani discusses his journey to Afghanistan, which he undertook after
the 2009 Iranian presidential election, and published as Janistan, Kabulistan in 2010. Th...
In this interview conducted in 2016 In Christchurch, New Zealand,
the award-winning New Zealand travel writer Jill Worrall discusses
her book Two Wings of a Nightingale: Persian Soul, Islamic Heart
(2011), which narrates her travel to Iran. The narrative recounts
the expedition in which Worrall follows the ancient caravanserais
routes across Iran w...
This article discusses some instances of popular myths regarding post-Revolutionary Iran through discussing the power the Orientalist discourse in the West, particularly in the United States. It further draws attention to all human beings' potential for discrimination, racism, sexism, and xenophobia and argues that the only path in front of man tow...
As far as literary representations of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the West are concerned, according to Farzaneh Milani, Betty Mahmoody’s best-selling Not Without My Daughter (1987) remains “the most popular book ever published in the U.S. about Iran.” Nevertheless, the book’s unprecedented popularity notwithstanding, it has garnered scant criti...
The cataclysmic events of 9/11 marked a watershed in 21 century American and world history and, more than ever before, brought Islam to the fore of both public and academic arenas by reinvigorating the curiosity, fear, and suspicion with which Islam has always been
characteristically regarded in the west (E. Said, 1978, pp. 60, 255, 261, 288, 345)...