Teaching
My teaching is grounded in cross-cultural attentiveness and literacy, as well as historical specificity. In my courses, I encourage students to think both with and beyond familiar geographic and temporal boundaries, and to pay close attention to the ways aesthetic forms intersect with political, social, and philosophical questions. Together, we practice close reading—of texts, images, films, and exhibitions. We return often to questions of form, translation, and reception. Why does a writer choose one word over another? What does it mean for an image to move across histories or geographies? We engage with art historiography, postcolonial theory, Marxist thought, and theories of translation not to apply them to works of art, but to place them in dialogue—as distinct yet connected registers of thinking that can illuminate, challenge, or complicate one another.
I design my courses to support both collaborative exchange and independent thinking. In many of my seminars, I use labor-based or engagement-based grading, as a way to foreground sustained effort, revision, and meaningful participation over polished performance. While much of my teaching focuses on Iranian and Middle Eastern modern and contemporary art, my courses are never bound by national frameworks. My hope is that my students leave my classes with the tools to look carefully, write thoughtfully, and approach art history as a living, evolving field—one that asks to be disrupted, rethought, and reimagined.
Courses
In addition to co-teaching our collaboratively designed introductory course for first-year students at RISD—where I lecture on the “Art of the Islamic World” unit—I teach a range of courses focused on modern and contemporary art of Iran and the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Much of my teaching also centers on the discipline of art history itself, with a focus on historiography and the production of art historical knowledge, drawing from my educational background in Comparative Literature. As an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Photography, I teach courses on image theory as well. During the summers, when I return home to Tehran, I often teach art history courses at private institutions. Below is a list and brief description of the courses I teach:
Theories of the Image
Images provoke, hail, console, and incriminate us. They disrupt our understanding of time; expose that which governs our lives and deaths; and influence how we negotiate selfhood and otherness. Yet, we pay little attention to the ontology of the image. This course tries to shift our attention to the question of ontology. It also interrogates the epistemological limits of our relationship to and understand-ing of the image. It asks: What are images? How do they shape our world and inform our subjectivities? What does it mean to read and respond to them contemporaneously? What are the uses and abuses of images? What ethical positions do we take in facing images of violence, suffering, and misery? How are some of the most consequential concepts of our world, such as race, gender, or nation, informed or even reshaped by images? Students will read texts by a variety of authors who have all, in one way or another, changed how we understand images: from Walter Benjamin and André Bazin to Carol Mavor and Donna J. Haraway and from Michel Foucault and Georges Didi-Huberman to Jonathan Crary and Jasmine Nichole Cobb. Students discuss these texts in class and submit assignments that knit together their analyses of readings with an artist whose work they are investigating in their own practice.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Dédé, 1906
Introduction to Iranian Cinema
“From international film festivals to university campuses, from museums of modern art to neigh-borhood theaters, Iranian cinema has now emerged as the staple of a cultural currency that defies the logic of nativism and challenges the problems of globalization.” Hamid Dabashi writes this in the introduction to his landmark study of Iranian cinema, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future (Verso, 2001). This course introduces you to the history of Iranian cinema, from the Iranian New Wave (1960s) to the present. It examines the ways in which it occupies an important place on the scene of global cinema while it “defies the logic of nativism.” We will watch some of the most prominent movies by acclaimed Iranian filmmakers Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Bahram Beyzai, Asghar Farhadi, Forough Farrokhzad, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Dariush Mehrjui, Marzieh Meshkini, Amir Naderi, and Sohrab Shahid-Saless. Students will engage in in-class discussions on films and texts by a diverse array of filmmakers and commentators, and will submit assignments that intertwine their analyses of the films with the readings.
Still from Mohsen Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence (1996) – detail
Forms, Words, Affects
This course examines key methods and interpretive frameworks used by art historians and critics to read works of art. Each week centers on a major methodological approach foundational to the production of art historical knowledge—ranging from Formalism, Iconography, and Marxism to Feminism, Queer Theory, Race and Representation, Affect Theory, and Postcolonialism. In parallel, we trace the intellectual history of the discipline through primary texts by figures whose writings have shaped (and unsettled) art history’s foundations. Students will engage with canonical voices such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Erwin Panofsky, and Heinrich Wölfflin, alongside critiques and reorientations offered by thinkers like Georges Didi-Huberman, Edward Said, Linda Nochlin, Rasheed Araeen, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.Adriaen van der Spelt, Trompe l’Oeil Still Life with Flower Garland and Curtain, 1658 CE
Art and the Nation
Despite the prevalent self-congratulatory narrative espoused by art institutions in the metropolitan West, proclaiming the transcendence of national boundaries and heralding a prematurely celebrated cosmopolitan world, the enduring significance of “the nation” in contemporary art cannot be overlooked. The consistent reliance of curators, critics, and art historians on national backgrounds as crucial determinants in the curation and interpretation of artistic works suggests a reality far more complex than one might assume from the supposed cosmopolitan capability of art to cross national boundaries. Does contemporary art suggest that works can traverse national and linguistic borders without the need for translation? Is “the national” inherently opposed to “the global” and “the cosmopolitan,” or do these entities coexist? Must artists who engage with national themes necessarily eschew global perspectives? How can art be understood not merely as an expression of national identity but also as a force actively shaping the political and social agendas of nationalist and, at times, decolonial movements? This seminar addresses these questions through the works of prominent scholars including Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Butler, Edward W. Said, Neil Lazarus, Kaya Ganguly, Walter Mignolo, Saloni Mathur, and Timothy Brennan, among others.
Amrita Sher-Gil, Three Girls, 1935