Amy Motlagh

I was trained at Princeton University as a Persianist and comparatist, and spent the first decade of my academic career at the American University in Cairo (AUC) during a particularly turbulent period in Egypt's history. Living and teaching in Cairo deepened my long-standing interests in the Arab literary tradition and its connections not only to Persian but to other world literatures; however, my research remains primarily focused on Persianate contexts. Since returning to the US to teach at UC Davis in 2017, I have expanded the curriculum and programming in Persian language and literature, and built on existing connections to the Persophone communities of northern California. In 2020, I launched a podcast called "The Story of Iran" as a venue for sharing stories about Iran and the Persianate world through the lens of objects--large and small--that express aspects of this world's history and identities. You can listen to the podcast here: https://complit.ucdavis.edu/the-story-of-iran

My first book, Burying the Beloved: Realism and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford University Press), examines how the discourses of civil law and prose fiction developed coevally and contributed to the reification of controversial gender norms in twentieth-century Iran. I am currently working on two book projects: the first, Invisible Men: A Cultural History of Racial Thinking and Blackness in and about Modern Iran, critically examines the cultural history of Blackness in Iran and the Iranian diaspora through literature and cinema; the second project is a consideration of Persian language and literature in world literary and cultural circuits.

I am an affiliated faculty member with the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives in the Social Sciences and Humanities at UC Davis and a member of the Diversity Scholars Network.