Amir Moosavi

I came to Rutgers--Newark in the fall of 2018, following a year-long postdoc from the Volkswagenstiftung and Mellon Foundation in Berlin (2016-17) and a Visiting Assistant Professorship of Modern Iranian Studies at Brown University (2017-18). My research and teaching interests cover modern Arabic and Persian literatures, with an emphasis on Iran, Iraq, the Levant, and Afghanistan as well as the cultural history of the modern Middle East. I'm particularly interested in the way that cultural production deals with violent pasts and creates narratives and counter-narratives of conflicts. Currently, my primary research project is a book manuscript entitled, The Dust That Never Settled: Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War in Arabic and Persian Literatures. The book argues for the expansion of comparative literary and cultural 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. 

My other projects are based on the ramifications of the events that took place in the late 1970s and 1980s in cultural production emerging from the Arab and Persianate worlds, a co-edited volume on sensory readings of Persian literature, various translation projects from Arabic and Persian fiction and representations of the city in modern Arabic and Persian fiction.