Roxanne Varzi was born in Tehran, Iran to an Iranian father and an American mother and moved to the US just after the Revolution. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine. She has a Ph.D. in Social Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, and was the recipient of the first Fulbright for doctoral dissertation fieldwork to Iran since the Revolution. She is also the youngest Distinguished Senior Iranian Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, and has published in The Annals of Political and Social Science, Feminist Review, Public Culture, American Anthropologist, Eastern Art Report and the London Review of Books. She has been quoted in the LA Times, New York Times, Chronicle of Higher review among other media outlets. Her short stories have appeared in two anthologies of Iranian-American writing as well as The New York Press and in Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly for which she won a Short Story Award for Fiction. She is also a filmmaker (Plastic Flowers Never Die, 2009 Documentary Educational Resources) and a sound artist “Whole World Blind” at Publicbooks.org. Last Scene Underground: An ethnographic novel of Iran has won a 2016 Independent publishers gold medal award for fiction.
Anthropology, Film, Documentary, Writing, Iran, Middle East, Islam, Visual Anthropology
