About

Roxanne Varzi is a writer, artist, filmmaker, and anthropologist with a focus on social and cultural anthropology, media, war, sound ethnography, film studies, creative and experimental writing, and theater. Born in Iran to an American mother and Iranian father, she migrated to the United States shortly after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Her early experiences include a formative visit to Iran in 1991 during a year abroad at the American University in Cairo, which inspired her to live in Iran for a year and undertake ongoing journeys there. Her work often explores Iran's vibrant underground public culture and the impact of media and martyrdom on youth in post-revolution Iran. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and has held numerous prestigious fellowships, including the first Fulbright to Iran since the Revolution, a Woodrow Wilson Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and visiting fellowships at institutions such as Oxford University, Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung. Varzi is a professor at UC Irvine, where she teaches Anthropology, Film and Media Studies, Persian Studies, and Religious Studies. Her publications include two books, 'Warring Souls: Media, Martyrdom and Youth in post-Revolution Iran' and the ethnographic novel 'Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic Novel of Iran,' which won the 2016 Independent Publishers Gold Medal. Her creative work encompasses film, sound installations, and video art, with her film 'Plastic Flowers Never Die' distributed by Documentary Educational Resources and shown worldwide. She has also created sound and video installations such as 'Whole World Blind' and 'Salton Sublime.' Her writings have appeared in numerous academic journals and anthologies, and she has been quoted in major newspapers. Varzi's research and artistic projects consistently focus on Iran's social, cultural, and political landscapes, blending ethnography, media analysis, and creative expression.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Anthropology
• Architectural engineering
• History
• Geography
• Theology
• Engineering
• Philosophy
• Visual arts

Selected publications

• Anthropology students present their research in poetry, plays and op-eds in this course

  2024-08-19

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• Aristotle's fieldnotes*

  Anthropology & Humanism · 2023-07-25

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  Summary This piece is part of a special section of hundreds for Kathleen Stewart. It upends genres, labels, and categories (beginning with Aristotle) using dyslexia and decoding to unfold boxes.

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• Acting out: Hamed Taheri and the transformative power of Iranian underground theatre

  I.B.Tauris eBooks · 2021-01-01

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• Stan Brakhage and Ethnographic Praxis

  2021-02-23

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  Stan Brakhage (b. 1933–d. 2003) was a visual artist and filmmaker who embodied many of the theoretical tensions and pragmatic themes in cultural anthropology in the 20th century, despite not being an anthropologist and working almost totally through experiments in 16mm film. In traversing, and being claimed by, both modernist and postmodernist thinkers and artists alike, he was a creator as much influenced by the poetry of American Romanticism as he was the harbinger of a millennial deconstruction. He is generally considered, along with the filmmaker Maya Deren, the quintessential savant of American avant-garde cinema. His phenomenological approach to filmmaking and his attention to poesis in visuality, combined with his persistent dispensation with narrative and plot, drew to light still pressing existential questions about the space between structure and individualism, the unconscious mind, myth, and intersubjective experiences in the shared quotidian of everyday being. While his early works of the mid-1950s showed solidarity with the surrealist and Freudian-inspired themes of compatriots like Maya Deren, in the 1960s Brakhage quickly engaged with what he viewed as the untapped potential of cinematic celluloid as a malleable medium with which to both capture and express the immediacy of sensual experience. At the core of his creative impulse was an exploration of visual perception unfiltered by symbolic textuality. To that end, his 16mm films were mostly soundless, color-saturated, nonlinear impressions of the most consequential of life’s relational phenomena; birth, sex, human development, death, and familial intimacies untethered from linguistic discourses, character drama, and traditional act-based storytelling structures. Brakhage’s process of etching and painting directly onto the emulsified film strips he used for shooting enabled his impressionistic questioning of the boundaries of representation in moving images. Brakhage asserted that, much as with human vision, such manipulations punched holes in the epistemic orthodoxy of experiential narrative and instead stressed the messy and affective ways that our sensory organs force us to negotiate our immanent worlds. His early artistic tenure found him characteristically prolific in modernist aesthetics as he explored concepts ranging from the psychoanalysis of dreaming and the Freudian death-drive in Reflections on Black (1955) to the metaphysical man-myth opus Dog Star Man (1961–1964). Such themes paralleled similar theoretical concerns emergent in anthropology in the mid-20th century as evident in both the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and the persistence of the Freudian unconscious as an explanatory hermeneutic. Today, Stan Brakhage’s influence in anthropology is evident in ethnographic filmmaking that challenges the documentary impulse, ambiguates hegemonic truth claims, and explores the modalities of sensorial representation related to human experience through iterative experimentation.

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• 41. Ethnographic Fiction: The Space Between

  2020-05-01 · 1 citations

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• The Palace Is the Place

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020

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  • History
  • Geography
  • Architectural engineering
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• Ethnographic Fiction

  2020-01-01 · 1 citations

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• Islamic Morals

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020

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  • Philosophy
  • Theology
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• chapter five. Shifting Subjects: Public Law and Private Selves

  2020-11-20

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• Prince Caspian

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

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Frequent coauthors

• Joanne Nucho

  1 shared

• Fadi A. Bardawil

  Duke University

  1 shared

• Soheila Shahshahani

  University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences

  1 shared

• Konstantina Isidoros

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Gold Medal, Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic Novel of…
• Independent Publishers Gold Medal Award for Last Scene Under…
• Winner, Short Story Award for Ethnographic Fiction, Society…
• First Fulbright to Iran since the Revolution (date not speci…
• Youngest Distinguished Senior Iranian Visiting Fellow at St.…