Foad Torshizi
Foad Torshizi is an assistant professor of Art of the Islamic World at RISD. He holds degrees in Comparative Literature and Society and Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (PhD and MPhil, Columbia University), Art History (MA, University of Minnesota) and Photography (MFA, Honar University of Tehran). Prior to joining the RISD faculty in 2017, he taught graduate students at Tehran University, advanced undergraduates and graduate students at the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy as well as undergraduate students at Columbia University’s Core Curriculum.
Torshizi’s research interests are in the areas of global contemporary art, contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, postcolonial theory, ethics of readership, theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism, comparative literature and politics of translation and interpretation. His research has been published in academic journals in both the US and Iran. Most recently, he published an article in Grey Room (MIT Press) titled “Loquacious Objects: Contemporary Iranian Art, Autotranslation, and the Readings of Benevolence.” Additionally, he has co-edited (with Joshua I. Cohen and Vazira Zamindar) a special issue of ARTMargins (MIT Press, June 2023) titled “Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn.”
Torshizi is currently working on a manuscript project tentatively titled The Clarity of Meaning: Contemporary Iranian Art and the Cosmopolitan Ethics of Reading in Art History. The manuscript examines the ways in which Western disciplinary forms, and more specifically art criticism, return home to circumscribe aesthetic diversity in Iran, demanding that the aesthetic economies of Iranian artifacts align with Euro-American understandings of meaning, value, aspiration and desire.
Courses
Fall 2023 Courses
PHOTO 541G-01
GRADUATE SEMINAR
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The Graduate Seminar works in complement with Graduate Critique to provide a forum in which students assemble in discussion, analysis and reflection around a set of ideas, practices and histories that are of substantial relevance to photography, its history and its contemporary forms. The content of the seminar will vary from year to year, but students will be expected to read, research, discuss, write about and/or present on the material addressed in class. The seminar will interact with the department's Visiting Artist lecture series, with the SEI Lecture Series, and with MCM events at Brown. Attendance at those lectures is highly recommended.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate Photography Students.
Major Requirement | MFA Photography
THAD H180-01
INTRODUCTION TO IRANIAN CINEMA
SECTION DESCRIPTION
From international film festivals to university campuses, from museums of modern art to neighborhood theaters, Iranian cinema has now emerged as the staple of a cultural currency that defies the logic of nativism and challenges the problems of globalization. Hamid Dabashi writes this in the introduction to his landmark study of Iranian cinema, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future (Verso, 2001). This course introduces you to the history of Iranian cinema, from the Iranian New Wave (1960s) to the present. It examines the ways in it occupies an important place on the scene of global cinema while it defies the logic of nativism. We will watch some of the most prominent movies by acclaimed Iranian filmmakers Dariush Mehrjui, Ebrahim Golestan, Nasser Taghvai, Amir Naderi, Sohrab Shahid-Saless, Forough Farrokhzad, Jafar Panahi, Masoud Kimiai, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beyzaie, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Marzieh Meshkini, Asghar Farhadi, Tahmineh Milani, Ebrahim Hatamikia, and Kamran Shirdel. We will also look at the works of diasporic artists, including Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, Ramin Bahrani, Mitra Farahani, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Granaz Moussavi.
Please note that the evening sessions listed in the class timetable are exclusively reserved for film screenings and do not constitute regular class meetings. Attendance at these screenings will factor into students' final grades.
Open to Sophomore, Junior or Senior Undergraduate Students.
Elective
THAD H608-01
THAD MUSEUM FELLOWSHIP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Registration by application only. Application is restricted to concentrators in The Theory & History of Art & Design. A call for applications will be sent to all THAD concentrators.
Please contact the instructor for permission to register; registration is not available in Workday.
Elective
Spring 2024 Courses
THAD H608-01
THAD MUSEUM FELLOWSHIP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Registration by application only. Application is restricted to concentrators in The Theory & History of Art & Design. A call for applications will be sent to all THAD concentrators.
Please contact the instructor for permission to register; registration is not available in Workday.
Elective
THAD H180-01
INTRODUCTION TO IRANIAN CINEMA
SECTION DESCRIPTION
From international film festivals to university campuses, from museums of modern art to neighborhood theaters, Iranian cinema has now emerged as the staple of a cultural currency that defies the logic of nativism and challenges the problems of globalization. Hamid Dabashi writes this in the introduction to his landmark study of Iranian cinema, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future (Verso, 2001). This course introduces you to the history of Iranian cinema, from the Iranian New Wave (1960s) to the present. It examines the ways in it occupies an important place on the scene of global cinema while it defies the logic of nativism. We will watch some of the most prominent movies by acclaimed Iranian filmmakers Dariush Mehrjui, Ebrahim Golestan, Nasser Taghvai, Amir Naderi, Sohrab Shahid-Saless, Forough Farrokhzad, Jafar Panahi, Masoud Kimiai, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beyzaie, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Marzieh Meshkini, Asghar Farhadi, Tahmineh Milani, Ebrahim Hatamikia, and Kamran Shirdel. We will also look at the works of diasporic artists, including Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, Ramin Bahrani, Mitra Farahani, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Granaz Moussavi.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H229-01
ART HISTORY, POSTCOLONIALISM, DECOLONIALITY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In recent years, the idea of decolonizing museums, academic institutions of art, and the narrative and curricular spaces of art history has gained increased urgency. But the concept and practice of decolonization have a much longer history than their recent (re)emergence in the art world. As a response to colonial and imperial orders of the world, decolonization set new boundaries for thought, knowledge, and for “being” itself. This seminar asks whether these boundaries have been effectively translated into the recent challenges that are posed against institutional practices of art and art history. It also asks about the ways in which postcolonialism, with a genealogy different from decolonization, is situated vis-à-vis the historical origins of decolonization in the writings of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon and its resurgence in art history and museology. We will read texts by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Aníbal Quijano, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Audre Lorde, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward W. Said, Geeta Kapur, and Walter Mignolo among others.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective