Afshin Hafizi

Education

Ph.D. in English, University of Florida, December 2004

M.A. in International Affairs, (an interdisciplinary study with a concentration on Central Asia and the Middle East), Department of Political Science, Florida State University, 1999

M.A. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory (Algemene Literatuurwetenschap), University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, 1998

http://www.uu.nl/uupublish/homeuu/1main.html

B.A. in English Language and Literature, University of Kerman, Iran, 1988

Academic Employment

September 2005: Adjunct Online Instructor at The Art Institute Online

August 2005: Brittain Post-Doctoral Fellow in Technical Communication in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC) at Georgia Institute of Technology

January 2005 - May 2005: Adjunct Instructor of English at the University of Florida

March 2004 - present: Adjunct Instructor of Humanities and philosophy at the City Colege, Gainesville, Florida

August 2003 - May 2005: Adjunct Instructor of Humanities and Philosophy at Santa Fe Community College, Gainesville, Florida, Department of Humanities and Foreign Languages

August 2003 - December 2003: Adjunct Instructor of English at Santa Fe Community College, Department of English, Gainesville, Florida

2000-2004: Tutoring at the Reading and Writing Center, University of Florida.

1999 - 2004: Instructor (teaching assistant), English Department, University of Florida

1988-1989: Instructor (teaching assistant), English Department, Azad University of Kerman, Iran

Publication

"Ideology and Utopia in William Godwin's Caleb Williams" in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Spring 2003, Volume 4, Number 2.

"The Economy of Travel: A Tale of Life/Profit and Death/Expenditure," in the electronic journal of Transdisciplinary Journal of Emergence, associated with the University of Milan, Italy.

http://www.sdabocconi.it/emergence, Fall 2003.

"Cultural Transmission: Representation and Secrecy in Kader Abdolah's Spijkershrift," in the electronic journal of Transdisciplinary Journal of Emergence, associated with the University of Milan, Italy.

http://www.sdabocconi.it/emergence, Fall 2004.

"The Archival Machine of Language and the Logic of Spectrality: Of Repetitions, Translations, and Ghosts." Forthcoming in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Spring 2006.

Work in Progress

"Iranian Cinema, Kiarostami, and the Principle of Indeterminacy"

"The Poetics of Displacement in World Literatures"

"Travel, Economy, and Death in World Travel Narratives"

"The Literature of Loss and the Persistence of Memory in Exilic and Diasporic Literature"

Presentation(s)

"The Future of Politics and the Politics of Future" in The MRG's (Marxist Reading Group)2nd Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Florida (participants were Thomas Frank, Barbara Folly and Fredrik Jameson)

"Reda Bensmaïa's The Year of Passages and the Deterritorialization of Language" presented at ASCA's (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis) annual Conference in June 2003 (participants were Hamid Naficy, Fouad Laroui, George van Den Abbeele, and Mireille Rosello)

"Tradition and Modernity in Iran: The Question of the Archive" invited presentation at the Hoover Institure, Stanford University, October 2004.

Awards

Kirkland Research Travel Fellowship, 2002-03

McLaughlin Dissertation Fellowship, 2004

Travel Grant from the Center for European Studies at the University of Florida, Summer 2004

Courses Devised and Taught

ENC 1101: "Advertisement: Sexuality, Race, and Class"
An expository and argumentative writing course (freshman level) in which the reading material addressed the various ways in which sexuality, race, and class are represented on a cultural level in general and in advertisement in particular. The general line of argumentation is placed within the discourse of the relationship of the Self to the Other (Egoism and Alterity).

ENC 1102: "Love, Death, and Memory"
A writing course about literature (freshman level) in which the reading material addressed the interrelationships and articulations between the themes of love, death, and memory in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, James Joyce's The Dead, Francois Truffault's The Green Room (film), and Allen Resnais's Fog and Night (film), as well as in some shorter works such as Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Chopin's "The Story of an Hour."

ENC 1102: "Travel Writing and Colonialism: Representations of Home and Abroad in Literature and Media"
This writing course about literature (freshman level) explored the interrelationships between travel writing and the discourse of colonialism. Among the texts covered by this course were: Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation and David Spurr's The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration.

ENC 1145: "Writing about Travel"
Some of the issues or themes dealt with in this especial topic course on writing (sophomore level) are as follows: the ideology of leisure/free time, fear and desire of the other, the discourse of experience and authenticity, the 'authentic' versus 'the perfect simulation' in tourism, travel in the colonial situation, etc. We also paid attention to the concepts/categories of home and abroad, exile and immigration, heimliche and unheimliche as well as different theories of travel and its motivation. The students studied and analyzed David Spurr's The Rhetoric of Empire as well as various short stories (Albert Camus's "The Guest" and "The Adulterous Woman") and essays (Dean MacCannell's "Staged Authenticity," Brian Musgrove's "Travel and Unsettlement: Freud on Vacation" and Madan Sarup's "Home and Identity")

LIT 2110: "World Literature"
A collection of works from the Middle Ages to the Modern time, including sections of mystic/religious texts of the Christian and Islamic tradition (Abelard and Attar), sections of One Thousand and One Night, passages from Montaigne's Essays and More's Utopia, to more modern literary writing from Russia (Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground), South Korea (Sonu Hwi's "thoughts of Home"), Egypt (Naguib Mahfouz's "Zaabalawi"), Iran (Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl), Norway (Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck), and Ireland (James Joyce's The Dead).

LIT2110 syllabus

LIT 3003: "World Travel Narratives"
This upper-division course on travel narratives is a historical as well as theoretical survey of major and minor works, fictional or non-fictional, representing the authors' personal or cultural experience of the foreign. Starting from the Odyssey and covering some of the Medieval narratives of peregrination (Marco Polo in Italy and Ibn Battuta in Morocco), the course was more concentrating on the 19th and 20th centuries. The travel narratives of these periods are analyzed within the context of colonialism (19th and the first part of the 20th century) as well as within the context of the phenomenon of tourism (roughly the second part of the 20th century). In addition to a course pack consisting of shorter pieces, the students were expected to read and analyze the following texts: George van den Abbeele's Travel as Metaphor, David Spurr's The Rhetoric of Empire, Roland Barthes's The Empire of Signs, Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place.

LIT 3003 syllabus

ENC 2210: Technical Writing
A course in writing and designing documents in technical and professional discourse communities, in which the students produced a number of technical genres: correspondences, reports, résumés, proposals, etc.

ENC2210 syllabus

HUM 2210: "Ancient World through the Renaissance"
Standardized course in Western humanities in which I taught Roy T. Matthews and F. Dewitt Platt (eds.) The Western Humanities at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville. This course is a survey of the cultural history (architecture, sculpture, painting, philosophy, literature) of the Western civilization from the Ancient world through the Renaissance.

http://plaza.ufl.edu/mhafizi/index/HUM%202210.htm

HUM 1020: Introduction to Humanities

Teaching humanities from the Ancient World to Modern Time

HUM 1020 Syllabus

Teaching Interests

Literary and Critical Theory, Humanities, Philosophy and Literature, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Modernity/Postmodernity, Travel Literature, Immigrant and Exilic Literatures, Middle Eastern Studies, TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language)

Language Proficiency

Dutch: excellent reading, speaking, and writing
German: reading knowledge
French: limited reading knowledge
Persian (Farsi): native speaker

Professional Affiliation

Member of the editorial board of TJE (The Transdisciplinary Journal of Emergence), an online journal published by SDA Bocconi Business School in Milan, Italy.

Modern Language Association

Technical Skills

Certificate of Online training from Socrates Distance Learning Technologies Group

Certificate in Effective Use of Technology in the classroom from the University of Florida

Proficient in webCT

Web Production (Web Page Creation, Site Maintenance)

Some Skills in HTML

Proficient in Dreamweaver

Image Production: Image Manupulation, Creation and Editing

Proficient in Photoshop

Video Production: Taping, Editing, and Conversion

Some Skills with Premier

Community Service

Teaching English to prospective international students at The English House in Gainesville, Florida.

Voluntary Service at The Hippodrome State Theater in Gainesville, Florida.

References

Professor John. P. Leavey, Chair of the English Department at the University of Florida as well as chair of my dissertation committee, jpl@english.ufl.edu, (352) 392-6650

Professor Scott Nygren, English Department, University of Florida, nygren@ufl.edu, (352) 392-6650

Professor Phillip Wegner, English Department, University of Florida, pwegner@english.ufl.edu, (352) 392-6650

Professor Andrew Nichols, City College, Gainesville, Florida, (352) 335-4000