Roxanne Varzi

Roxanne Varzi is an ethnographer, writer, artist, filmmaker, playwright, dyslexia advocate and Full professor of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University, was the first Fulbright scholar to Iran since the Revolution, A Woodrow Wilson Scholar and the youngest Distinguished Senior Iranian Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. She is working on a graphic novel and a Murder Mystery series that teaches anthropology, book one, Death in a Nutshell: an Anthropology Whodunnit came out this fall.
Her writing has been published in The London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Annals of Political and Social Science, Feminist Review, Public Culture, American Anthropologist. She is the author of Warring Souls: Media, Martyrdom and Youth in post-Revolution Iran, Duke University Press, 2006 and the 2016 Independent Publishers Gold Medal winning novel Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic Novel of Iran Stanford University Press and on audible. Her film, Plastic Flowers Never Die, 2009 is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources and has been shown in Festivals all over the world. Her short stories have appeared in the New York Press and Anthropology and Humanism for which she won a first place short fiction award and in three anthologies of Iranian-American writing and are anthologized in four books of Iranian-American writing. Her multi-media sound and video projects, Whole World Blind, No Wings to Fly to God and Salton Sublime address war and climate change. Her first play Splinters of a Careless Alphabet about French philosopher Henry Corbin and the Iranian Revolution is being developed as a graphic novel and her second play, Yalda: an Iranian Twelfth Night was recently directed by Eli Simon in a reading at the New Swan Shakespeare Center at UCI.