91³Ô¹ÏÍø

Pardis Dabashi is Assistant Professor of Literatures in English and Film Studies at 91³Ô¹ÏÍø, where she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Comparative Literature Program, the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies Program, and the Film Studies Program. Her scholarship examines the intersection of form, politics, and affect in narrative film and literary modernism, as well as the epistemology, experience, and practice of aesthetic criticism. She teaches classes on twentieth-century literature, film, and theory. Dabashi is especially interested in how aesthetic and rhetorical form index or trouble stances of political and epistemic certainty, which she explores by examining structures of feeling such as ambivalence and doubt. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such venues as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Feminist Media Histories, Textual Practice, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Film Quarterly, Early Popular Visual Culture, Arizona Quarterly, Public Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She is co-editor of The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge UP, 2022) and she is co-editor of the Visualities forum on Modernism/modernity Print Plus. Her first book, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2023) studies plot, ambivalence, and normativity in the classical Hollywood cinema and the modernist novel. It received the 2024 Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize.

She is currently working on two new book projects, one that studies the history and consequences of the exclusion of Islam from the methodological landscape of EuroAmerican criticism and theory, the other on affects of humiliation and mourning in Iranian New Wave Cinema and Persian modernist literature of the 1960s and 70s.