Contact

Phone: 470-578-6491

Email: iomidvar@kennesaw.edu

Office Location: MS 223

Office Hours:
TBD

Research

Research Statement

My research is cross-disciplinary and explores alternatives to objectivist theories of knowledge, which historically have served to perpetuate a range of authoritarian structures such as slavery, patriarchy, and colonialism as well as to draw sharp conceptual divisions between the humanities and technical fields. The goal of my research is to understand social conditions in which good ideas can be formed through communication of views by heterogeneous groups. An area of my studies is intercultural translation, whether between people of various nationalities, cultures, and languages or between public (in literature and journalism) and professional and expert languages in modern industrial societies. For example, I have been studying how Europeans and colonized societies have viewed each other and what scholars in humanities and technical fields understand about each other’s specialties.  I have also been studying the implications of the shifting boundaries of public, private, and professional discourse communities as effected by the dramatic rise in the use of networked digital media.  

Publications

Historic Engagements with Occidental Cultures, Religions, and Powers has just been published (October 2014) by Palgrave Macmillan. This February, Muslims and American Popular Culture, a two-volume reference set I co-edited with Anne R. Richards, was published by Praeger.  Among my other publications are “Limits of Countering Stereotypes Through the Use of Visual Rhetoric: A Study of Photographs of Iran,” in Writing the Visual: A Practical Guide for Teachers of Composition and Communication (Parlor Press, 2008). I have also published translations of modern Iranian poetry in journals such as Poetry Review, New Letters, Tampa Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Puerto del Sol. Some of my opinion pieces have appeared in Tehran Bureau, a news site in partnership with PBS's Frontline and the Guardian of London, including a four-part piece comparing the Iranian and Tunisian revolutions.  

Conferences

I presented, my works were presented, or I facilitated workshops at international, national, and regional conferences, among them:

  • National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention (US)
  • Fulbright Association Conferennce (US)
  • Annual International Studies Association Conference (US)
  • Annual Cultural Studies Association Conference (US)
  • National Collegiate Honors Council Conference (US)
  • International Symposium on Information Communication Technologies for Language Learning and Teaching (Tunisia)
  • Polytechnic Summit (US)
  • Multiculturalism and Intercultural Exchanges Conference (Tunisia)
  • Cross-Media and Cross-Cultural Adaptations Conference (Turkey)
  • 7th Annual Americana Conference (Tunisia)
  • International Conference on Silence (Tunisia)
  • Annual World Forum on Education and Culture (Italy)
  • International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities (Tunisia)
  • Power and Persistence of Stereotyping Conference (Portugal)
  • College English Association (US)
  • Conference on College Compositoin and Communication (US)
  • IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (US)
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