Amir Moosavi

I came to Rutgers, Newark in the fall of 2018, following a year-long EUME postdoc funded by the Volkswagenstiftung and Mellon Foundation in Berlin (2016-17) and a visiting assistant professorship in modern Iranian studies at Brown University (2017-18). My research and teaching interests cover modern Arabic and Persian literatures and the cultural history of the Middle East, with an emphasis on Iran, Iraq, the Levant. My courses at RU-N have revolved around Arabic and Persian fiction and film, world literature, translation studies, and war culture. I'm particularly interested in the way that cultural production deals with violent pasts, wars, notions of transitional justice, and representations of urban space. I am currently completing a book manuscript entitled, Dust That Never Settled: Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War in Arabic and Persian Literatures. The book argues for the expansion of comparative literary studies across the Arabic and Persian linguistic spheres based on the common experience of the Iran-Iraq war and the various responses of writers to it since 1980.​

In addition to my book manuscript, I am also working on other research projects. One of these has recently resulted in a volume which I co-edited titled Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses: Sensory Readings of Persian Literature and Culture. It is the first collection of articles that brings the expanding field of sensory studies to Persian language cultural production, with an emphasis on Persian literature. The second project deals with transregional representations of the final decade of the Cold War in Persian and Arabic literatures. It seeks to understand how literary and cinematic cultures were affected by the major events that took place in the late 1970s and 1980s in a geographic space that spans from North Africa to South Asia (i.e., the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein's consolidation of power, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iran-Iraq War, etc.)  and how later film, fiction, and art looks back at that period to in an attempt to make sense of it today. From 2018-2020, I edited a series of blog posts dealing with this topic that can be found here. In June 2022, I co-organized a second conference around a similar topic called "The Literary 1980s in the Middle East and North Africa: Towards A Transregional History of the Present" and am currently in the process of putting together both peer-reviewed and open-access publications based on it.