Amir Moosavi

Amir Moosavi is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Newark. He holds a PhD in Middle East and Islamic studies from New York University. His research and teaching interests center around Arabic and Persian literatures, with a focus on modern and contemporary fiction. His publications have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Critique, Alif, and Iran Namag, among other venues. In 2021, he co-edited Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses: Sensory Readings of Persian Literature and Culture (Leiden UP, 2021). During his fellowship year with the ISGRJ he will complete his book manuscript titled Dust That Never Settled: Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War in Arabic and Persian Literatures and two articles related to a second project on cultural representations of the late Cold War era in the Middle East.  

Publications

• “Sonic Triggers and Fiery Pools: The Senses at War in Hossein Abkenar’s Scorpion in Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses (Leiden University Press, 2021)

• “Desacralizing a Sacred Defense: The Iran-Iraq War in the fiction of Hossein Mortezaeian Abkenar” Iran Namag (Fall 2020)

• New Books Feature: “Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses” with M. Khorrami, for TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, May 3, 2022, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/37120

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• Iraq: 20 Years After the U.S. Invasion

• “Mourning Mothers and Never-ending Wars: Animals and the Environment in Nasim Mara’shi’s Haras,” paper presented at European Congress of Iranian Studies, Leiden, Netherlands, August 2023

• “Collecting Fragments: An Arabic-Persian Translation Workshop,” workshop for Arabic and Persian language students at Bard College

Previous Organizations:

• Brown University

• Forum Transregionale Studien

• New York University

Accomplishments:

• NEH Grant

• Mellon/Volkswagen Foundation Fellow

Upcoming Projects:

• Dust That Never Settled: Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War in Arabic and Persian Literatures (book manuscript, in progress for submission to Stanford University Press, October 2023)

• “War and Relation: Reading the 1980s across the War Literatures of Lebanon and Iran” (in progress for Middle Eastern Literatures)

• “Mourning Mothers and Wars that Never End: reading Nasim Marʿashi’s Haras in the shadow of the Iran-Iraq War” (forthcoming in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies)

My research to date has mostly dealt with how writers have treated the afterlives of war and violent conflict. As a scholar of the literatures of the modern Middle East, one of the ways I do this is by examining how authors of fiction have dealt with the long-term environmental effects of warfare. While military history, journalism, and what we conventionally understand as “war stories” often focus on the number of people killed or injured in war, there is another side of the story that we can understand through processes of slow violence against the land, water, air, and non-human life of a place polluted by warfare. This is another aspect of warfare that I believe is important for us to realize to see how tragic the long-term effects of war can be, and exactly the type of work I’ve tried to do in the final chapter of my recent book Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War.