Middle Eastern and North African Colloquium Series

Middle Eastern and North African Colloquium Series

Nahid Siamdoust is an assistant professor of media and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford, 2017). She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, was the Yarshater Postdoctoral Associate in Iranian Studies at Yale University, and a visiting professor in the anthropology of religion at Harvard Divinity School’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program. Previously, she was an Iran correspondent for Time Magazine and a Middle East correspondent for Al Jazeera International. Her recent commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy, BBC, and NPR. She is currently working on her second book project, which examines publics and the politics of joy in Islamic Iran. Her co-edited volume (with Houchang Chehabi) titled Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music & Society will be published in 2025.

Instances of women breaking into spontaneous dance in public spaces have become a recurrent phenomenon in Iran these past years. They spilled into full view during the country’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, when women expressed their joy and bodily autonomy in part through public dance. The impact of these instances of public dancing is magnified manifold by their digital circulations on social media, and the lively engagement by others in comments and reproductions. How do we interpret this social phenomenon within theories of agency and everyday resistance without assigning a purely political subjectivity to the subaltern? Siamdoust traces the history and significance of these viral dance videos in Iran, and the agentive potential of public joy.

This event will be held over zoom.

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Meeting ID: 819 6089 7364