Overview
My most recent book Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran (Stanford UP, 2019) draws on The Kate Millett papers in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture in the Duke archives to recover the lost history of the women’s protests that followed quickly on the heels of Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascent to power as the leader of the Iranian Revolution. Less than a month after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the American feminist Kate Millett traveled to Tehran to join Iranian women in a celebration of International Women’s Day. As the celebration turned into six days of demonstrations, Millett’s picture appeared in major International newspapers as a participant. She was pictured holding a small tape recorder. These tapes, Millett’s “whisper tapes,” captured the soundscape of a flickering (and unfettered) moment of revolutionary vitality that spawned imaginative narratives and theories among feminists around the world. As I listened to Millett's audio tapes and in between the often contradictory layering of voices and sounds captured on them, I began writing the Whisper Tapes as a playfulinterpretive guide for Millett in retrospect – a guide to the demands of postrevolutionary Iran in 32 entries following the 32 letters of the Persian alphabet, introducing the reader to the Revolution’s slogans, its habits, its instincts, its foods, its monuments, its collectivism, its cast of characters and importantly to the Iranian women’s movement—a movement some have claimed Millett herself never quite grasped.
I am currently working on a project on contemporary networked social movements and their uses and perceptions of social media since 2009.
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
Not Feminism, Human Solidarity: Qurrat al-'~Ayn Tahirih in Early Historical Drama
Journal Article Hawwa · January 1, 2023 Qurrat al-'Ayn Tahirih has long been associated with feminism and early agitation for women’s rights in Iran and elsewhere. These articulations fly in the face of her repeated construction in the historical work of her contemporaries as the condition of th ... Full text CiteBLACK SEALS: MISSIVE FROM IRAN’S NATIONAL MUSIC
Chapter · January 1, 2021 CiteSoundscapes of the iranian revolution
Journal Article Journal of Middle East Women's Studies · July 1, 2020 Full text CiteRecent Artistic Works
Global Perspectives on Animal Memes: How Cats Took Over the Internet
Installation August 7, 2015Asia Society New York Iranian New Wave film series
Film January 1, 2013Education under Fire
Film October 14, 2011View All Artistic Works