In this talk, Nahid Siamdoust will introduce her newly published co-edited volume (with H.E. Chehabi) Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music and Society (Harvard 2026) before delving into her own chapter on the state’s regulation of women’s vocals in postrevolutionary Iran. Iran Amplified is the first edited volume on music in modern Iran, seizing on a burgeoning academic field to present a cross-genre collection of compelling scholarship, musician narratives, and primary sources. This groundbreaking volume offers historiography and critical examination of music’s significant role in social and political mediation in Iran spanning a century, investigating central analytical vectors such as Islam, gender, media technology, alterity, transnational flows, and diasporic communities.
Nahid Siamdoust is an assistant professor of media and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford 2017), co-editor of Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music and Society (Harvard 2026), and has published in Iranian Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Cultural Anthropology. Her recent commentaries have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy, BBC, and NPR. She is currently a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, jointly hosted by the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, writing her book on postrevolutionary Iranian publics and media.
Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.