Ahmad Nadalizadeh, who received his Ph.D. in our department in the Summer of 2021, has accepted the offer of an assistant professorship in the Honors College at the University of Wyoming. The courses he will be teaching in Laramie include “Cinema of the Middle East,” “The Politics of Cinema and Literature in Modern Iran,” and “Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema of the Middle East.”

Ahmad is also the recipient of the ACLA’s Charles M. Bernheimer Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention) for 2023. The committee assigning the award praises his entry as follows:

“Repetition Beyond Representation: Media, History and Event in Iran, 1951-1990” brilliantly considers the limits of representation and the political possibilities of aesthetic remediation. Rejecting accounts that tie modernity to Westernization as well as those that frame modern Iranian history as a response to Western imperialism, Nadalizadeh offers an alternate historiography of modern Iran as non-linear, durational, and interstitial. Through his precise readings of aesthetic works (including the poetry of Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, the fiction of Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, and the films of Abbas Kiarostami’s) which connect them to the 1953 coup, the 1979 revolution, and the 1990 earthquake, he persuasively traces an aesthetics of repetition that capitalizes upon the unexpected. Nadalizadeh’s analysis moves adeptly between literary criticism, visual culture, film studies, and postcolonial studies, charting a productive path towards what he calls “a poetics of an interstitial historiography.”