14.05.2026 Evening lecture: Prof. Dr. Nahid Siamdoust, "From Dancing for Life to Dancing for Death: Authentic and Borrowed Affects in Iranian Publics"

In this talk, Nihad Siamdoust traces Iran’s “insurgent dance publics” from their sociopolitical context within the Islamic Republic to their co-optation by Iranian diaspora groups.

During the country's 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, the world witnessed street gatherings of Iranian women dancing around bonfires and throwing their headscarves into the flames in dramatic, collective gestures, and the centrality of joyous affects and women's bodily autonomy in these public enactments. While these street scenes appeared astounding, they carried affective and embodied resonances with everyday acts — practices cultivated in both private and public spaces over many years. 
Yet perhaps more astounding were the scenes of people dancing at the graves of those killed in the Dey Massacres of January 2026 — and more so still, certain diaspora groups’ dancing in response to the US-Israeli bombing of their own country. In prior social media circulations of these joyous affects, and in the commentaries surrounding them, scenes of public dancing were frequently posited as expressions of "authentic" Persian culture in opposition to state-imposed Islamic culture.
Dr Siamdoust argues that, in their diasporic enactments in the early months of 2026, dance scenes functioned outside of their sociopolitical coherence, with bodies co-opting internally derived discursive tropes in service of the political goals of empire.

Nahid Siamdoust is 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 Times, New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy, BBC, and NPR. In 2023, she launched the podcast series “Woman, Life, Freedom: All in on Iran,” now renamed “IranCast,” featuring interviews with authors of new books about Iran. She’s delivered a TEDx Talk titled “Dance for Life.” In the academic years 2026–28, Nahid is a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, jointly hosted by the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Thursday, 21 May 2026, 18:00 - 20:00
Hörsaal (Raum 00A26)