Hamid Dabashi

Hamid Dabashi (Persian: حمید دباشی) is an Iranian-American intellectual historian, cultural critic and literary theorist who has studied Iran, world cinema and Shi'a Islam from a postcolonial perspective. He is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City, the oldest Chair in Iranian Studies. He is the author of nineteen books. Among them are his Authority in Islam; Theology o... more

Hamid Dabashi (Persian: حمید دباشی) is an Iranian-American intellectual historian, cultural critic and literary theorist who has studied Iran, world cinema and Shi'a Islam from a postcolonial perspective. He is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City, the oldest Chair in Iranian Studies. He is the author of nineteen books. Among them are his Authority in Islam; Theology of Discontent; Truth and Narrative; Close Up: Iranian Cinema; Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran; an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema; and his one-volume analysis of Iranian history Iran: A People Interrupted. Born and raised in southern city of Ahvaz in Iran, Dabashi was educated in Iran and then in the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in sociology of culture and Islamic studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at... less