Amirhossein Vafa
I have been an Assistant Professor of English (and Comparative) Literature at Shiraz University since 2016. I hold a PhD in English from the University of Sheffield, where I was also an Honorary Research Fellow until 2019. Besides my home country of Iran, where I have been teaching at the BA level and convening postgraduate seminars, I have also taught in the UK and Germany.
My doctoral research, “Rethinking World Literature from Moby-Dick to Missing Soluch,” was an aesthetic intervention into the riddled politics of US-Iranian relations since the Cold War, and later evolved into my first monograph, Recasting American and Persian Literatures (Palgrave, 2016).
As a faculty member at Shiraz University, and scholar of English Literature within a postcolonial context, my research has further evolved to address the fraught conditions of “modernity” in Iran from a literary and cultural stand point. The hallmark of this turn has been co-authoring an article, “After Isolation” (Millennium, 2019), in which we perceive the circulation and reception of world (and namely American) literatures among some Iranian readers as a “decolonial” (rather than a “postcolonial”) encounter.
At the moment, I am working on Ali Mirdrekvandi’s counter-canonical novel, "No Heaven for Gunga Din" (1965), which is the only example of Anglophone literature written in Iran proper. The peculiar history of the novel’s origins, production, and circulation, set against the backdrop of a subversively complex narrative, is the account of an alternative to colonial modernity, for a nation still struggling to come to terms with the predicament of coloniality.
With Mostafa Abedinifard and Omid Azadibougar, I am also co-editing a volume on 'Persian Literature as World Literature' (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2020), in which we attempt at a paradigm shift in the study of Persianate literature and cultures beyond the limits of Area Studies.
Navigating between research and teaching, I am also a Managing Editor with the Journal of World Literature (Brill), where I help a brilliant team of scholars and editors with the production of original research on the diverse geographies of world literatures.
My doctoral research, “Rethinking World Literature from Moby-Dick to Missing Soluch,” was an aesthetic intervention into the riddled politics of US-Iranian relations since the Cold War, and later evolved into my first monograph, Recasting American and Persian Literatures (Palgrave, 2016).
As a faculty member at Shiraz University, and scholar of English Literature within a postcolonial context, my research has further evolved to address the fraught conditions of “modernity” in Iran from a literary and cultural stand point. The hallmark of this turn has been co-authoring an article, “After Isolation” (Millennium, 2019), in which we perceive the circulation and reception of world (and namely American) literatures among some Iranian readers as a “decolonial” (rather than a “postcolonial”) encounter.
At the moment, I am working on Ali Mirdrekvandi’s counter-canonical novel, "No Heaven for Gunga Din" (1965), which is the only example of Anglophone literature written in Iran proper. The peculiar history of the novel’s origins, production, and circulation, set against the backdrop of a subversively complex narrative, is the account of an alternative to colonial modernity, for a nation still struggling to come to terms with the predicament of coloniality.
With Mostafa Abedinifard and Omid Azadibougar, I am also co-editing a volume on 'Persian Literature as World Literature' (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2020), in which we attempt at a paradigm shift in the study of Persianate literature and cultures beyond the limits of Area Studies.
Navigating between research and teaching, I am also a Managing Editor with the Journal of World Literature (Brill), where I help a brilliant team of scholars and editors with the production of original research on the diverse geographies of world literatures.
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