Amir Moosavi

For the 2020-2021 academic year I am on sabbatical and research leave with support from the American Council of Learned Societies.  

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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 of 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, and Afghanistan. My courses at RU-N have revolved around Arabic and Persian fiction and film, translation studies and war culture. I'm particularly interested in the way that cultural production deals with violent pasts, wars and notions of transitional justice, and representations of urban space and culture in fiction and film. At present, my primary research project is 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 two other research projects. The first is an edited volume titled Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses: Sensory Readings of Persian Literature and Culture, co-edited with M.M. Khorrami. It aims to be the first attempt to bring the expanding field of sensory studies to Persian language cultural production. The second project comes from a workshop I organized in 2017 titled "Reading the Middle East's '1979 Moment'." It seeks to understand how literary and cinematic cultures were affected by the histrionic 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 rise to power, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iran-Iraq War, etc.)  and how later film and fiction looks back at that period to in an attempt to make sense of it today. Since 2018, I have edited a series of blog posts dealing with this topic that can be found here.