Dr Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad

Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad is currently the research lead in a project on Islamophobia and the media funded by the British Academy. While his publications have focused on Iranian cinema and media, questions of politics have been of foremost importance to him. Saeed’s research interests also include diasporas and transnational media, Islamophobia, communications and Shi’i Islam as well as Third Cinema. His monograph The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic (Routledge 2010) is groundbreaking in its ethnographic engagement with the question of media audiences in Iran. He has engaged with various research methodologies, from ethnography to digital ethnography and big data. Saeed was a postdoctoral research associate with the AHRC funded project Tuning In: Researching Diasporas at the BBC World Service. His teaching has spanned media and film studies, anthropology and Islamic studies at undergraduate and postgraduate levels at SOAS, the Institute of Ismaili Studies/UCL, and Roehampton University. His media appearances include: BBC World Service (radio and TV), BBC Radios 3 and 4, Iran International (UK) and VoA TV (USA). He has worked as a consultant on projects with Ipsos MORI and Iran International (UK). Saeed is the Associate Editor of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

Iranian cinema; popular cultures in the Middle East and North Africa; Third Cinema; transcultural media, especially film; film theory; visual anthropology.