General Events

Amir Moosavi is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Newark. He researches and teaches about Persian and Arabic literatures, with an emphasis on modern Iran, Iraq, and the Levant. His recently finished book, Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War, was published by Stanford University Press in June 2025. The book considers how Iraqi and Iranian writers have wrestled with representing the Iran-Iraq War and its legacy, from wartime to the present.

Although sometimes called "a forgotten war" by pundits, the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) was the longest two-state war of the 20th century. Since 1980, it has inspired thousands of literary, cinematic, and artistic works. This talk explains why, three and a half decades after its conclusion, this war remains a major topic for writers of Persian and Arabic fiction, and how both Iranian and Iraqi writers have transformed the literatures of this war from authoritarian propaganda into literatures of mourning and resistance, with connections to some of the biggest social and political challenges the two countries face today.