Forum for the Cultural Studies of Iran

This forum, based at the School of Modern Languages, aspires to encourage the application of the evolving approaches to the study of culture to the history of artistic production in Iran. The unifying element of the Forum is artistic cultural production and the spaces in which it has occurred as an aesthetic, economic, sociopolitical phenomenon in Iran.

We are interested in the role cultural products have played in the expansion of the concept of art and ‘the redistribution of the sensible’— what can be seen and heard in society due to the machination of political, cultural and religious aesthetics that confine these sounds and images in a hierarchical system of values. The Forum encourages analytical and theoretical discussions on the multiplicity of locations that art (literature, cinema, theatre, music, dance, visual arts, architecture, etc.) occupies in Iranian discourse on modernity and post-industrial contemporaneity.