Sareh Z Afshar is a writer, educator, translator, scholar, and storyteller. Their research and teaching interests reside at the intersection of performance and politics, with an emphasis on critical cultural theory, materiality of visuality, aesthetics of everyday life, minoritarian memory and trauma studies, collective movements and new/digital media ecologies, and transnational queer feminist praxis. She received her PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, served as the 2023–24 Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, and is currently an Associate Research Scholar at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran & Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University, where she’s writing her first monograph, “Authority & Ambiguity: Performances of Death and Power in Postrevolutionary Iran.” The project theorizes what she calls “performances of death” (PoD)—i.e., hypervisual performances that materialize around death and its commemoration in postrevolutionary Iran—to question how PoD inform the sociopolitical agency of Iranian subjects born and raised during the Iran-Iraq war (1978–88). Examining photographs, films, fiction, art installations, animations, and urban murals and rituals, they argue for PoD’s potentiality in diluting the sense of fatalism deeply rooted in the Iranian imaginary, consequently making possible the conjuring of alternative collective futures.
Previously, they have taught courses at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, College of Arts & Science, and Tandon School of Engineering, as well as at Brown, Purdue, and Montclair State University. They have served as assistant and managing editor to TDR: The Drama Review and e-misférica, respectively. Co-editor of the multilingual, multimedia platform, Feminist Futures, their writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in TDR: The Drama Review, e-misférica, TPQ: Text & Performance Quarterly, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Khayyam, Ravagh, and edited book volumes. Having lost more than two cities—lovely ones, Montréal, Tehran, New York—she spends her time in New England contemplating the balance between being too foreign for home and too foreign for here.