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.

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