About

Maziyar Faridi is a scholar of comparative literature and film studies. His research interests include critiques of the sovereign subject in continental philosophy, identity and media, postcolonial transnational studies, and Middle East and North African modern literatures and cinemas. At the intersection of Iranian and global modernism (1922-1979), his current book project traces the emergence of a poetics that resists both colonial modernity and anticolonial recourse to identitarianism. Foregrounding an understudied corpus of Iranian literary and cinematic texts, Faridi argues that in this poetics rests the promise of new forms of political relationality beyond modernity’s politics of the sovereign subject. His research has been recognized by several awards, including the Charles Bernheimer Prize for the best dissertation from the American Comparative Literature Association (2020-2021) and the Ferdowsi Tusi Award for outstanding research in Persian literature and culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2018). He is an alumnus of the Paris Program in Critical Theory, a joint program between Northwestern University and Universite Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris III). He holds certificates in Middle East and North African Studies (Northwestern), Critical Theory (Northwestern), and World Literature (Harvard University and City University of Hong Kong).