Dr Ashkan Sepahvand awarded Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Fellowship in New York

With support from the New York Public Library, Dr Sepahvand will read, research, and re-imagine the Iranian-American theatre director Reza Abdoh’s final, unrealized work: an adaptation of the Shahnameh (Persian: “Book of Kings”) written in 1993, a year before the artist’s untimely passing from HIV/AIDS.

Abdoh’s later works are legendary for portraying the excess and decadence of late imperial America through raw physical energy, multimedia experimentation, and sociopolitical provocation. The Shahnameh, an epic composed by the poet Abolqassem Ferdowsi in the 11th century and considered a masterpiece of Persian literature, is a text whose modern reception is entangled with conflicting discourses of Iran as a nation and identity. Given Abdoh’s iconoclastic approach to performance-making and his irreverence towards culture, what kind of a Shahnameh did he envision?

During his Fellowship, Dr Sepahvand's will conduct an exegesis of Abdoh’s work through the prism of “kharabaat” (the ruins), a Persianate performative trope, to explore how diasporic practice translates and transforms the so-called 'original.' Ruination serves as queer aesthetic and critical methodology to articulate the potentiality of loss, longing, othering, defeat, and survival. The imaginary of kharabaat will inform a series of new drawings created during the Fellowship period, rehearsing Abdoh’s Shahnameh vis-a-vis the long artistic tradition of illustrated Persian manuscripts, many of which are held at the New York Public Library.

We look forward to seeing Dr Sepahvand's drawings and hearing more about his research project when he returns to St John's at the end of Trinity Term.

Congratulations, Ashkan!