Bio of Roxanne Varzi

Roxanne Varzi is a writer, artist, filmmaker, playwright, dyslexia ally and Full professor of Anthropology and Film and Media Studies at the University of California Irvine. She has a PhD in Social Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, held the first Fulbright Fellowship to Iran since the Revolution, and was the youngest Distinguished Senior Iranian Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University and A Woodrow Wilson Scholar at NYU. Known for her work as a multi-modal anthropologist, she has given workshops and spoken all over the world on her own work as well as on research design. She is currently at work on a graphic novel based on her play Splinters of a Careless Alphabet about the French philosopher Henry Corbin and the Iranian Revolution and on the second book in the Armchair anthropology Murder Mystery Series. Her second play, Yalda: an Iranian Twelfth Night was directed by Eli Simon in a reading at the New Swan Shakespeare Center at UCI.

Roxanne's work is published in The London Review of books, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Annals of Political and Social Science, Feminist Review, Public Culture, American Anthropologist and authored two books,  Warring Souls: Media, Martyrdom and Youth in post-Revolution Iran, Duke University Press, 2006 and 2016 Gold Medal Award-winning Novel Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic novel of Iran Stanford University Press. Her short stories have appeared in the New York Press and Anthropology and Humanism for which she won a first place short fiction award and in three anthologies of Iranian-American writing. She is the author of Death in a Nutshell: An anthropology Whodunnit in her Armchair Anthropology Whodunnit cozy murder mystery series that advocates for neurodivergent thinkers while teaching anthropology to everyone from high school to grad school.