Behdad, Ali
Professor and Chair
Humanities 191
Tel: 310.825.4377
Fax: 310.206.5093
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Education

• B.A., University   of California, Berkeley, 1983
• M.A., University   of Michigan, 1986
• M.A., Middlebury College, 1988
• Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1990

Interests

Postcolonial Literature and Theory; Literary and Cultural Theory; European Representation of the Middle East; Victorian Novel and Travel Literature; US Immigration History; 19th Century Photography of/in the Middle East.

Selected Works

Books:

• Contact Visions: On Photography and Modernity in the Middle East 1860-1910 (Manuscript in progress).
• A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States, (Duke University Press, September 2005).
• Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
• Ed. Orientalism Beyond "Orientalism," special issue of L'Esprit Createur (Summer 1994).
• A Companion to Comparative Literature, co-edited with Dominic Thomas, Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing, 2011.

Book Chapters/Articles:

• “Postcolonial Theory and the Predicament of “Minor Literature,” in Minor Transnationalisms, edited by Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
• “On Globalization, Again,” in Postcolonialism and Beyond, edited by Suvir Kaul and Ania Lumba, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
• "Une Pratique Sauvage: Postcolonial Belatedness and Cultural Politics," The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies Postcolonial, edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
• “Foreign Objects: Finding Solutions to Democracy’s Problems,” (and Juliet Williams), Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, (2001).
• "National Identity and Immigration: American Polity, Nativism, and the "Alien," in Beyond Dichotomies, edited by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, (Buffalo: SUNY Press, 2000).
• "The Powerful Art of Qajar Photography: Orientalism and (Self)-Orientalizing in Nineteenth-Century Iran," special issue on "Representing the Qajars: New Research in the Study of 19th-Century Iran," edited by Layla Diba, Journal of Iranian Studies, (2001).
• “Founding Myths of the Nation, Or What Jefferson and Hamilton Forgot about Immigration,” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies," (2001).
• "Orientalist or Orienteur? Antoin Sevruguin and the Margin of Photography," Sevruguin and the Persian Image, edited by Fredrick Bohrer, Washington, D.C.: Sackler Gallery Series, Smithsonian Museum, (1999).
• "INS and Outs: Producing Delinquency at the Border," Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, (Spring 1998).
• "Reflections on the Family Photos of Iranians in Los Angeles," Suitcase (Summer 1997).
• "Nationalism and Immigration in the United States," in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, (1997).
• "Eroticism, Colonialism, and Violence," Identity, Violence and Self-determination, edited by Samuel Weber and Peter van der Veer, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
• "Border INSpection: Crossing the U.S. Border," Centuries' Ends, Narrative Means, edited by Robert Newman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).