Sareh Z Afshar

Position
Associate Research Scholar
Office Phone
Office
2-C-19 Green Hall
Bio/Description

Bio

Sareh Z Afshar (she/او) is a writer, translator, scholar, and storyteller. Currently an Associate Research Scholar at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University, she is a graduate of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University (PhD 2021, MPhil 2020, MA 2011). She also holds an MA in communication and MS in learning technologies and media systems. Her research and teaching interests reside at the intersection of performance and politics, with an emphasis on the politics of representation, materiality of visuality, aesthetics of everyday life, minoritarian memory and trauma studies, collective movements and new/digital media ecologies, and transnational queer feminist praxis. Prior to joining Princeton, she served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. 

At Princeton, she is working on her monograph, “Authority and Ambiguity: Performances of Death and Power in Postrevolutionary Iran,” which theorizes what she calls “performances of death” (PoD) as a framework through which one Iranian generation knows itself and is known to others. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in TDR: The Drama Review, e-misférica, TPQ: Text & Performance Quarterly, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Feminist Futures, Khayyam, Ravagh, and edited book volumes. She has taught courses at NYU, Brown, Purdue, and Montclair State University, and served as managing editor to e-misféricaand Ravagh and assistant editor to TDR. She has lost two cities—lovely ones, Montréal and Tehran—but deems the East Coast a soothing corner for contemplating the balance between being too foreign for home and too foreign for here. Together with Narges Bajoghli, she is co-creator/editor of Feminist Futures, a multilingual, multimedia platform they dreamt up and realized through the Rethinking Iran Initiative at Johns Hopkins University.