Negar Mottahedeh, Professor of Literature

Please note: Negar has left the "Asian & Middle Eastern Studies" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

I am a cultural critic and theorist specializing in interdisciplinary and feminist contributions to the fields of Middle Eastern Studies and Film and Media Studies. I have published five books on Iranian Cinema, the history of reform, revolution and the uses of various media in protest. My book "#iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life" (Stanford University Press, 2015) is about one such social media mobilization. "#iranelection" follows the protest movement around Iran's fraudulent presidential election in 2009 to investigate how the emerging social media platforms of the era developed as a result of the international solidarity around the hashtag. Just as the world turned to social media platforms to understand the events on the ground, social media platforms adapted and developed to accommodate global activism. "#iranelection" reveals the new online ecology of social protest and offers a prehistory, of sorts, to the uses of hashtags and trending topics, of selfies and avatar activism, citizen journalism and YouTube mashups. 

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 playful interpretive 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.

Contact Info: 

Office Location:	125C Friedl Building (E. Campus), Buchanan and Trinity, Durham, NC 27708-0670
Email Address:
Web Page:	https://negarmottahedeh.squarespace.com

Teaching (Spring 2026):

• LIT 320S.01, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS/SOCIAL MEDIA Synopsis

  Friedl Bdg 102, MW 04:40 PM-05:55 PM

  (also cross-listed as AAAS 247S.01, AMES 318S.01, CMAC 320S.01, ICS 320S.01, ISS 323S.01, LATAMER 320S.01, RIGHTS 323S.01, VMS 323S.01)

• LIT 690S.04, SPECIAL TOPICS IN LITERATURE Synopsis

  Smith Wrhs 177, W 08:30 AM-11:00 AM

  (also cross-listed as ENGLISH 590S-4.04, GERMAN 690S.04, ROMST 690S.04)

Office Hours:

By appointment negar@duke.edu

Education:

Ph.D.	University of Minnesota, Twin Cities	1998
M.A.	University of Minnesota, Twin Cities	1994
B.A.	Mount Holyoke College	1990

Specialties:

Film Theory & History
Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies
Critical Theory

Research Interests: Film Studies, Social Media, Photography, Material Culture, and Middle Eastern Studies

Current projects: https://negarmottahedeh.squarespace.com/, http://twitter.com/negaratduke

Negar Mottahedeh is a cultural critic and film theorist specializing in interdisciplinary and feminist contributions to the fields of Middle Eastern Studies and Film Studies. She is known for her work on Iranian Cinema, but has also published on the history of reform, revolution and the uses of social media in protest. Her new book “#iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online life” (Stanford University Press), about one such social media mobilization, will be published this spring. #iranelection follows the protest movement around Iran's fraudulent presidential election in 2009, to investigate how emerging social media platforms developed international solidarity. Just as the world turned to social media platforms to understand the events on the ground, social media platforms adapted and developed to accommodate this global activism. The 2009 protests in Iran were the first revolts to be catapulted onto the global stage by social media, just as the 1979 Iranian Revolution was agitated by cassette tapes. #iranelection reveals the new online ecology of social protest and offers a prehistory, of sorts, to the uses of hashtags and trending topics, of selfies and avatar activism, citizen journalism and YouTube mashups. https://negarmottahedeh.squarespace.com/

Areas of Interest:

Middle East, North Africa

Keywords:

Alternative mass media • Historiography • Middle East specialists • Motion picture film

Curriculum Vitae

Representative Publications   (More Publications)   (search)

1. Mottahedeh, N, Representing the Unpresentable: Images of Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran (2008), Syracuse University Press [html]
2. Mottahedeh, N, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (2008), Duke University Press [books.php3]
3. Mottahedeh, N, 'Life is Color!' Towards a Transnational Feminist Analysis of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 'Gabbeh', Signs, vol. 30 no. 1 (2004), pp. 1403-1426, University of Chicago Press (Special Issue on film feminisms.) [doi]  [abs]
4. Mottahedeh, N, Off the Grid: Reading Iranian Memoirs in Our Time of Total War, Middle East Research and Information Project (September, 2004) [html]
5. Mottahedeh, N, Collection and Recollection: On Studying the Early History of Motion Pictures in Iran, Early Popular Visual Culture, vol. 6 no. 2 (June, 2008), pp. 103-120, Informa UK Limited [doi]