Amir Moosavi

Amir Moosavi serves as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English at Rutgers University–Newark, with dual affiliation to the Honors College. His academic journey includes a Volkswagenstiftung/Mellon Foundation postdoc in Berlin (2016-17) and a visiting professorship at Brown University (2017-18). He teaches courses on Arabic and Persian fiction, world literature, translation studies, and war culture, emphasizing Middle Eastern urban spaces and climate crisis representations.

His educational background features a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University (2016), advanced Arabic studies at Damascus University (2010) and American University in Cairo (2005-06), plus an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies and B.A. in History from NYU and University of Wisconsin-Madison respectively.

Moosavi's research centers on modern Arabic and Persian literatures within Middle Eastern cultural history, particularly Iran, Iraq, and the Levant. He investigates how cultural production processes violent pasts, wars, transitional justice, and environmental crises through sensory studies and ecocritical frameworks. His current book manuscript Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War (Stanford University Press) pioneers comparative analysis across Arabic-Persian linguistic spheres using shared war experiences.

His publication trends reveal sustained focus on Iran-Iraq War representations across sensory studies, gender perspectives, and transregional Cold War legacies. Recent work bridges Persian literary analysis with environmental humanities, while co-edited volumes like Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses establish new methodologies for sensory readings of Middle Eastern cultural production.

Notable awards include:

• National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship (2021-2022)
• American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2020-2021)
• Volkswagen/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016-2017)
• Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship (2013)
• Rutgers Undergraduate International Studies Grant (2023-2026)

He directs major research initiatives including the Undergraduate Arabic Language Initiative and co-organized the 2022 conference The Literary 1980s in the Middle East and the Maghreb. His grant portfolio features NEH, ACLS, and Fritz Thyssen Foundation support for transregional Cold War literary studies. While specific advisees aren't listed, his teaching includes graduate seminars on war literature and translation theory.

Moosavi leads collaborative projects examining transregional Cold War representations through blog series (2018-2020) and conference publications. His work connects scholars across North Africa to South Asia, focusing on how literary cultures process historical turning points like the Iranian Revolution and Lebanon Civil War through contemporary retrospection.