Overview
Arash Shokrisaravi is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His research lies at the intersection of comparative literature, continental philosophy and literary theory, Iranian and Middle Eastern studies, intellectual history, and ancient philosophy. His work ranges from ancient Iranian and Zoroastrian literature, Middle Persian (Pahlavi) and Andarz traditions, and Persian Sufism to modern and contemporary Iranian literature, diaspora, cinema, and cultural studies. His broader interests include care, truth, ethics, subject formation, home and belonging, cultural memory, migration and diaspora, and comparative methodology.
His dissertation, Toward Comparative Care Studies: On Iranian Genealogies of Care, examines historical manifestations of care across Iranian literary and intellectual traditions, from pre-Islamic religious and ethical texts through Persian Sufi literature to modern and contemporary writing. The project places these traditions in comparative dialogue with major philosophical genealogies of care and contributes to broader debates in comparative literature, intellectual history, Iranian Studies, and the humanities of care.
Shokrisaravi’s broader research develops comparative approaches to care across literature, philosophy, ethics, politics, environmental thought, migration and border studies, cinema and media, psychology, neuroscience, and the study of cognition. Across these areas, he is particularly interested in how literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions shape conceptions of value, ethical relation, belonging, memory, and human concern.
His scholarship on Foucault, truth, subjectivity, borders, and literary theory has appeared in The Pluralist and in the Bloomsbury volume, Truth in the Late Foucault: Antiquity, Sexuality and Psychoanalysis. His research has also been supported by awards including the SPARC Graduate Research Grant and a competitive summer fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he pursued advanced study in Ancient Greek.
At Cornell, Shokrisaravi has designed and taught courses including Allegory and Iranian Allegorical Cinema; Care: Theory, Literature and Cinema; and Home, Diasporas, and Disorientation in Iranian Literature and Culture.
His research languages include Persian, Middle Persian (Pahlavi), Ancient Greek, Arabic, Latin, and German.