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Register for the Zoom link:

https://bit.ly/hamid-naficy

Please join us for the Global Lunchbox, a weekly forum convened by the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University featuring conversations with scholars about their current research on a range of critical global issues.

This week we will talk to Hamid Naficy, Professor Emeritus of Radio/Television/Film and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University, about his book-in-progress “Like Water Through Stone: Memoir of a Melancholic Pessoptimist.”

Naficy's many books include Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (1999), An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001), and the four-volume masterwork A Social History of Iranian Cinema (2011-12).

A Social History of Iranian Cinema has been called “a landmark achievement,” “a must read for virtually all concerned with modern Iranian history,” and “essential reading not only for the cinephile interested in Iran’s unique and rich cinematic history but also for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the cataclysmic events and metamorphoses that have shaped Iran.”

Naficy's life and work were the subject of the 2017 documentary film Mouth Harp in Minor Key: Hamid Naficy on/in Exile, directed by Maryam Sepehri. A story told between two continents and spanning half a century, Mouth Harp in a Minor Key contextualizes Naficy’s intellectual achievements within his personal experience and the dynamics of Iranian-American politics.