Pardis Dabashi is an assistant professor of Literatures in English, Film Studies, and Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She works on the intersection of form, politics, and affect in global modernism and popular film, as well as the epistemology of literary criticism. She has written on modern Persian fiction, Iranian cinema, and Euro-American modernism, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including PMLA, Modernism/modernity, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Film Quarterly, Early Popular Visual Culture, Arizona Quarterly, Textual Practice, Public Books, and Politics/Letters. She is co-editor of The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge UP, 2022) and the Visualities forum on Modernism/modernity Print +. Her first book, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel studies the status of plot in the modern novel and the classical Hollywood cinema (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2023).
She is currently working on two new projects. The first works at the intersection of Islamic theology, Qur'anic hermeneutics, and the epistemology of aesthetic criticism; the second examines the aesthetic legacies of the Qajar dynasty as recollected in twentieth-century Persian literature, visual arts, and cinema.