Roxanne Varzi

Assistant Professor of Anthropology (PhD: Columbia, 2002)
office: Social Science Plaza B, 2245
phone: (949) 824-7146
email: rvarzi at uci dot edu
Website: www.roxannevarzi.com

Currently I am working on researching and writing about the "culture" produced by the Iranian government during the Iran-Iraq War. My main interests in this area are memorialization, especially space-specific sites such as the former war front and urban museums of martyrdom. I am also very interested and have published on the cinema that was produced during the war years, in particular a ten-year long documentary project that brings into question notions of the real. I am also working on a documentary about war culture in Tehran. My previous work, which will be published in a book by Duke University Press analyzes the Iranian revolutionary project of creating a strong Islamic citizenry through an all-encompassing Islamic social space. My work is inherently interdisciplinary and engages in textual and visual analysis and ethnographic research. In the initial research (spanning seven years) I examined the cultural production and public policy of the Islamic State with a special emphasis on the Iran-Iraq War (radio, television, cinema, and especially public space: Islamic laws regarding behavior and dress, billboards and murals in Tehran). This culminated in an ethnographic study in Tehran of Iranian youth, who were born at the beginning of the revolution into secular upper-middle class families and who never experienced any other cultural space outside of Iran examining ways in which they consumed, transformed or rejected various state-produced "cultures."

My theoretical interests are with notions of representation, production of reality and ways in which ethnographic materials are produced, both in the written and visual form. I am also interested in ways in which ritual, religion and space are produced and consumed. I am also interested in ways in which war produces culture.

Selected Publications

Scholarly Works

Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran.
Duke University Press, May 2006.

Entries, Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, Second Edition, Macmillan Reference, 2003.

"Still Life: Mohsen Makmalbaf's Kandehar."
American Anthropologist 104 (2002).

"A Ghost in the Machine: The Cinema of the Iranian Sacred Defense."
In The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, edited by Richard Tapper. Pp. 154-166. London: IB Tauris, 2002.

"Iran Gardi."
Public Culture 11:3 (2000).

"Mercury Rising: Tajik Refugees in Kyrgystan."
Silk Road: Journal of Central Asian Studies 2:1 (1998).

Creative Works

"The Witness."
In Let me Tell You where I've been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora. University of Arkansas Press (2006).

"The Caravan."
In New York Press (January 2000).

"The Pelican."
In A World Between: Fiction, Poetry and Essays by Iranian-Americans, New York: George Braziller (1999).

"Refugee."
American Magazine 50:3 (1999).

Films

Making and Marketing Martyrs (documentary on cultural production and the Iran-Iraq War), in progress.