Hamid Naficy

Hamid Naficy (Persian: حمید نفیسی) is a scholar of cultural studies of diaspora, exile, and postcolonial cinemas and media, and of Iranian and Middle Eastern cinemas and media. He has written on theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diaspora cinemas and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas, publishing nearly a dozen books and scores of book chapters and journal articles. In addition, he has lectured nationally and internationally and his works have been cited and reprinted extensively and translated into many languages. His areas of research and teaching include these topics as well as documentary and ethnographic cinemas.

His most recent work, A Social History of Iranian Cinema (2012) was the winner of the Middle Eastern Studies Association’s Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award and received an Honorable Mention for the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. His previous work An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001) was a finalist in 2003 for the prestigious Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award and Choice Magazine selected it as one of the “outstanding academic titles for 2002.”

In addition to these, Naficy has produced many educational films and experimental videos, organized numerous symposia and lecture series, participated in major international film festivals, curated film series, and initiated the annual Iranian film festivals in Los Angeles in 1990 and in Houston in 1992. He is currently the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University in the department of Radio/Film/Television and is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Art History.

Naficy was born in Isfahan, Iran in 1944. He is related to Azar Nafisi, Saeed Nafisi, and Habib Nafisi. He has resided in the United States of American since 1964 when he moved to attend university. Naficy graduated from the University of Southern California with a B.A. in Telecommunications before going on to the University of California, Los Angeles where he earned an M.F.A. in Theater Arts and a Ph.D. in Critical Studies of Film and Television. Naficy returned to Iran from 1973 to 1978 after being invited to assist with the design, planning, and implementation of a new, progressive, multimedia national university in Iran, The Free University of Iran (Daneshgah-e Azad-e Iran), which was closed down after the revolution.

Selected Bibliography

Books

Author

• Hamid Naficy (2011). A Social History of Iranian Cinema: Volume 1: The Artisanal Era. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822347750.
• Hamid Naficy (2011). A Social History of Iranian Cinema: Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822347743.
• Hamid Naficy (2012). A Social History of Iranian Cinema: Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822348771.
• Hamid Naficy (2012). A Social History of Iranian Cinema: Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822348788.
• Hamid Naficy (2001). An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691043913.
• Hamid Naficy (1993). The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0816620876.
• Iran Media Index. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. (Translated in part into the Persian and published in Iran in nine installments in the monthly magazine Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Film, Shahrivar 1366-Mehr 1367 [1977–78], under the title "Iran az Cheshm-e Biganeh" [Iran Through the Eyes of Foreigners]).
• Film-e Mostanad (Documentary Film), 2 volumes. Tehran: Entesharat-e Daneshgah-e Azad-e Iran, 1978–79.

Editor

• Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Editor. London & New York: Routledge, 1999. An AFI Film Reader.
• Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged. Co-edited with Teshome Gabriel. New York: Harwood Academic Publishing, 1993.

Essays

• "Branch-Campus Initiatives to Train Media-Makers and Journalists: Northwestern University’s Branch Campus in Doha, Qatar," in The Education of the Filmmaking in Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. Edited by Metter Hjort. London: Palgrave, 2013. pp. 81–98.
• "Embodied Protest," in Mitra Tabrizian: Another Country. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag. 2012. pp. 16–20.
• "Accented Filmmaking and Risk taking in the Age of Postcolonial Militancy, Terrorism, globalization, Wars, Oppression, and Occupation," in Film and Risk. Edited by Mette Hjort. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012. pp. 143–164.
• "Teaching Accented Films As a Global Cinema," in Teaching Film. Edited by Lucy Fischer and Patrice Petro. New York: Modern Language Association Publication, 2012. pp. 112–118.
• "Neorealism Iranian Style," in Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style. Edited by Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar. University Press of Mississippi. 2012. pp. 226–239.
• "Situando o Cinema com Sotaque," in Cinema, Globalização e Interculturalidade. Edited by Andreá França and Denilson Lopes. Brazil: Editora Argos. 2010. pp. 137–161.
• "From Accented Cinema to Multiplex Cinema," in Convergence Media History. Edited by Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake. New York: Routledge, 2009. pp. 3–13.
• "Faster than a Speeding Bullet, More Powerful than a Locomotive—Mutual Instrumentalization of Culture, Cinema, and Media by Iran and the U.S.," in Media, Power, and Politics in the Digital Age: The 2009 Presidential Election Uprising in Iran. Edited by Yahya R. Kamalipour. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2010. pp. 205–220.