Kamran Rastegar
Research/Areas of Interest
Comparative literature, film studies, modern Arabic literature, modern Persian literature, memory studies, postcolonial studies
I study Persian and Arabic literary history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My first book Literary Modernity between Europe and the Middle East (Routledge, 2009) explored the origins of the conception of literary modernity in Arabic and Persian literatures, a topic that I have further addressed in articles and as editor of a special issue of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures and in articles and chapters for edited volumes.
Second, I research the role of cinema and visual culture in the formation of cultural memory in conflict and post-conflict social settings, with specific interests in the histories of Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and Algeria. This research is reflected in my second book, Surviving Images: Cinema, War and Cultural Memory in the Middle East (Oxford UP, 2015). I am currently completing a critical study of the cinema of the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, under contract with Wallflower/Columbia University Press.
Education
- PhD, Columbia University, New York, United States, 2005
- MPhil, Columbia University, New York, United States, 2003
- MA, Columbia University, New York, United States, 2001
- BA, Hampshire College, Amherst Center, United States, 1992