Hamid Dabashi

Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature

Email: hd14@columbia.edu

Iranian and Islamic Studies; Comparative literature; World cinema; medieval and modern Islam; philosophy of art

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.

Professor Dabashi has written 22 books, edited four, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, and comparative literature to world cinema and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). His books include Authority in Islam (1989); Theology of Discontent (1993); Truth and Narrative (1999); Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (2001); Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (2000); Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (2007); Iran: A People Interrupted (2007); and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (2006).

Among his most recent books are Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (Routledge, 2008); Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (Transaction Publishers, 2009); Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (Harvard, 2011); The World of Persia Literary Humanism (Harvard, 2014); Can Non-Europeans Think? (Zed Books, 2015); Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (Harvard, 2015); Iran without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation (Verso, 2016); Iran: Rebirth of a Nation (Routledge, 2017); The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World Literature (Columbia, 2019)