Atefeh Akbari

Atefeh Akbari received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, with an advanced certificate in Comparative Literature and Society. Prior to that, she received her BA and MA in English Language and Literature from the University of Tehran, Iran. Her research and teaching centers on postcolonial literature, Persian literature and Iranian music and cinema, and theories of Comparative and World Literature and translation studies. Her forthcoming book, The Worldliness of Persian Literature, excavates the global intertextuality and cosmopolitan ethos in key works of Iranian literature from the 1960s, which she draws upon to propose alternative models for the discipline and study of World Literature. Her second book project, provisionally titled “US-Iran Relations Redux,” is a study of critical junctures in the history of literary and musical connections between Iran and the United States, beginning in fourteen century Persia, moving through continents to the United States, and returning to twenty-first century Iran.

Akbari has published in the PMLA, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Philosophy and Global Affairs, and an MLA teaching volume on world epics. She is also a translator of prose and poetry from Persian into English, and vice versa. Her essays and translations are forthcoming in Spirit and Defiance: Ali Shariati in Translation (University of Minnesota Press).