Niloofar Sarlati

Languages: Arabic, English, French, Persian, some Spanish

Affiliations: English Language and Literature

Teaching interests:  My teaching engages fields of empire and postcolonial studies; history of capitalism; critical translation theory; critical theory; travel literature and the novel; moving images and their circulations (with particular attention to Iranian cinema in the broader context of West Asia)

Recent courses: 

• CL 422 “Circulating Worlds: Reading World Literature”: This course asks which literary works can afford to circulate, either in their own language or in translation? How have those circulating texts shaped our understanding of what/where “the world” is? How have they formed our understanding of the category of “literature”? And finally, how do they influence the basis of our comparative methods in the past as well as today? 
• CL 780 “Bargains of Translation” (Fall 2022): Engaging critical translation theory, literary history, and literature in translation, this graduate seminar offers studies of translation, broadly construed, to think through the West’s presumed “modernity” as well as responses and reactions to it.

Research interests:  Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and cultural productions in Persian, English, Arabic, and French, my current book project studies acts of giving and taking in different epistemologies of political economy. In contested contexts shaped by colonialism and capitalism, what gets to be called a gift? What is condemned as a bribe? What is a loan? And what is extortion? How are these names negotiated between languages with unequal status and power? In the semicolonial contact zone between Iran and Britain and within a multilingual compass of Persian, English, Arabic, and French, I study a bargain in translation between languages to show how the polysemy of terms of exchange have been turned into universal concepts. Reading at the intersection of travel writing, political economy, novel, and ethnography, my work brings minor texts together with established theoretical and literary texts to complicate categories of legal versus illegal exchange, authentic versus false offerings. My other research project probes the category of (in)complete colonialisms as in semicolonialism and informal empire. I ask how conversations between such cases can offer a fresh view of the “south-south” constellation in fields of empire and postcolonial studies.

Publications: 

• “Sweet and Salty: A Taste of (Semi)translating Colonial Modernity in Iran” forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature. 
• “Suspicious Gifts, Skeptical Words, and Speculative Translations: Colonial and Semicolonial Encounters Between English and Persian” forthcoming in Comparative Literature (December 2023) 
• “Between Polite Economy and the Gift: Nineteenth-Century British Travelers and Persian Excess.” Philological Encounters vol. 5 (2020): Issue 2, 134–160. 
• “In Exchange for the Language of Pleasantry.” Symplokē, vol. 25, no. 1 (2017): 439-49. 

Translation: Co-translation, English into Persian, with Esmail Abbasi, Mehran Mohajer, Taymaz Pour Mohammad, et al.) Mary Warner Marian, Photography: A Cultural History. Tehran: Herfeh Nevisandeh (2021).