Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle East/South Asia Studies and Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Persian Language and Literature at the University of California, Davis
About
Dr. Motlagh was trained at Princeton University as a Persianist and comparatist, and spent the first decade of her academic career at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Her first book, Burying the Beloved: Realism and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford University Press), was focused on the development of the novel and civil law in Iran, and specifically on the transformation of the figure of the classical beloved in modern literature. Her current work investigates racial thinking and racialized discourses in twentieth-century Iran and its diaspora.
Current Work:
The effacement of certain narratives from historical accounts, and their persistence in other textual and visual forms, is an important part of the work Dr. Motlagh has undertaken as a scholar. It formed the basis of her first book, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran (2012), and it runs as a current beneath her current project, A Cultural History of Racial Thinking in and about Modern Iran and its Diaspora. She sees the task of recovering what has been lost; of seeing, and seeing again, as an essential responsibility of her work as a scholar and as a teacher in the public service.
Research Area Keyword(s):
translation; gender; racial thinking; intellectual history
