Visiting Speaker Event with Dr Sara Tafakori

Sara Tafakori is an Assistant Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her research sits at the intersection of feminist and postcolonial theory, affect theory, and media and cultural studies. She explores feminist protest and digital culture as affective practices in (post)colonial contact zones, and examines their role in shaping political spaces of appearance, alternative archives, and revolutionary imaginaries. She is currently writing on feminist protest, attending to how mediated acts of refusal, however fragile, fleeting or solitary, gather force as they circulate and come to mark the contours of collective life. Her research has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (where her article was awarded the 2021 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship), the Review of International Studies (RIS), the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Feminist Media Studies. She holds a PhD in Middle East Politics from the University of Manchester, an MA in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London, and a BSc/MSc in Media and Communication Studies from the University of Tehran. Before joining the department, she held postdoctoral and teaching fellowships at the University of Edinburgh, SOAS, University of London, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from Princeton University, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (University of Western Australia), the British Institute of Persian Studies (funded by the British Academy), the Centre for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) at Ruhr University Bochum, the Max Weber Foundation, and the European International Studies Association (EISA). Prior to her academic career, she worked as a journalist and columnist for national newspapers in Iran.