Saeedeh Asadipour

Saeedeh Asadipour is a PhD student in the department of Art History focusing on contemporary Arab world art and visual culture. Her main academic interest is unravelling the ways in which bodies resist in time of crisis. For her master’s thesis, written in the University of Cincinnati, she looked at the ways of representing trauma in a Palestinian documentary film. Her PhD research primarily focuses on Palestine and exiled Palestinian artists, and is concerned with the ways in which the concepts of grief and trauma operate as political and gendered signifiers. As everyday experiences, war and exile are frequent visual motifs in Palestinian art, media and urban visual culture. The significance of the visual rendering of these experiences lies in their ability to affect Palestinian understandings of political practices and gender identity. She is particularly interested in the representation of grief and loss as manifested in the idea of martyrdom and funereal rituals, and their influence on the process of resistance and collective identity formation and gender roles. During June and July 2017, she will travel to Lebanon (as the main destination of Palestinian refugees) and to Palestine, supported by an SKJ travel grant, in order to conduct preliminary research, and to collect necessary information to develop my research proposal as well as refining my methodological and theoretical approach.

Read Saeedeh Asadipour’s fellowship report here.