Research

My research examines the convergences of “global” contemporary art, postcolonial theory, theories of translation, and the ethics of reading. It explores how art interacts with structures of power, translation, and cultural politics, with a particular focus on Iranian and Middle Eastern artistic practices. At its core, my work interrogates how frameworks of art history and criticism—primarily shaped by Western paradigms—inform the reading of non-Western art. Guided by a commitment to historicization, locatedness of theory, and what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has theorized as the “irreducible singularity” of texts, I seek to foreground the unique contexts and aesthetic multivalency of practices rooted outside the gravitational pull of Western aesthetics.
Major themes in my research include the politics of translation and its role in shaping the global reception of modern and contemporary Iranian art; the ethical stakes involved in representing subjects and practices formed outside hegemonic epistemic frameworks; and the tensions between localized aesthetic logics and the interpretive models imposed by metropolitan art historical discourses. I examine how feminist and queer temporalities reconfigure dominant historiographies, while remaining attentive—and critical—toward the universalizing tendencies of global feminism and the imposition of Western queer ontologies.
In the context of contemporary Iranian art, I explore how questions of nation, locatedness, gender, memory, and affect complicate normative narratives of modernity and visibility. I also trace the development of art criticism in Iran, focusing on how its conceptual vocabularies have emerged in conversation with, and at times in resistance to, broader intellectual movements—from modernism and structuralism to postcolonial theory. These concerns converge in my current book project, Unreadings, which critiques the monolingual orientation of metropolitan art history and explores the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic limits it imposes on the reception of Iranian art.
In 2022, I was a resident Research Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective,” a DFG-funded research initiative at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies, Freie Universität–Berlin, where I developed a project on Iranian modernism and the discourse of art criticism titled “Translating Minds: Iranian Modernism and the Discourse of Art Criticism.” My research has also been supported by the Faculty Development Fund and the Humanities Award at the Rhode Island School of Design. As a Ph.D. student, I received the William Campbell Award for service and leadership at Columbia University and was twice awarded the Ehsan Yarshater Fellowship in recognition of academic contributions in Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures.

Ghazaleh Hedayat, still from In (2013). Single-channel video, looped. Courtesy of the artist. Published in “The Affective Feminism of Ghazaleh Hedayat,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 41, no. 1, May 2021.