Dr Leili Golafshani

PhD (UQ), MA (UTehran), BA (Tabriz)

UQ Postdoctoral Fellow

Phone:  (+61 7) 3365 2574
Email:  l.golafshani@uq.edu.au

Biography

Leili Golafshani was an assistant professor in English Department at Tabriz University before joining UQ. Her PhD centrally involved working on memoirs and autobiographies of contemporary women writers in a series of different cultural contexts, with a strong emerging interest on women’s writing in the Iranian diaspora.

Research and Teaching Focus

Research

Current research: The Burnside, Durham and Smith archives of letters, exchanged between asylum seekers and these activists who campaigned on their behalf during the ‘Pacific Solution’, are read as uniquely Australian repositories of life narrative. These collections and their correspondents are interpreted as epistolary communities which can offer new insights into the representations and experiences of refugees incarcerated on Nauru, and most specifically the experiences of women. Using feminist approaches to life narrative, this project aligned with Professor Gillian Whitlock’s ARC Professorial Fellowship, engages with a difficult and contentious issue for feminist scholarship now: how images and narratives by and about Muslim women in particular are engaged in the campaigns for human rights on behalf of asylum seekers.

Teaching Interests

Guest lecturer in Gender, Culture, Race at EMSAH. Teaching interests also include literary and postcolonial theory and criticism, contemporary women's fiction and non-fiction, world literature.

Selected Publications

Book

• Translation of the book Diplomacy: The Dialogue between States by Adam Watson, Eyre Methuen, 1982. 239pp English to Persian, Tehran: Medad P, 1998; Nasle Nikan P, 2006. (This is a course book for undergraduates in Political Science at Tehran University)

Book Chapter

• “Framing ‘Amal’: Witnessing Asylum Seeker Testimony” in Australian Identity and Culture: Transnational Perspectives in Life Writing, ed Dr Paul Arthur, Antem P, forthcoming.
•  "Negative Relational Autobiography: Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade". Auto/Biography and Mediation. Ed. Alfred Hornung, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010. 237-244.

Refereed Journal Article

• “Self as a ‘Migratory Bird’: Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer”. Hecate, 34.1, May 2008.  104-119.

Review Articles

• Review of Boat People: Personal Stories from the Vietnamese Exodus 1975-1996 edited by Carina Hoang in LiNQ: Literature in North Queensland (2011).
• Review of The Bitter Shore: An Iranian family’s escape to Australia and the hell they found at the border of paradise by Jacquie Everitt. M/C reviews of Culture and the Media. 1 Dec 2008  http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3006
• “Iranian Exilic Memoir: A Review of Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening; Azar Nafisi, Reading ‘Lolita’ in Tehran; Azadeh Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad”, Politics and Culture.2 (2007).     http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=576

Fellowships, Grants, Awards

• UQ Travel Award for International Collaborative Research (York University, Canada).
• UQ Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
• Visiting Scholar, Griffith University (2008).
• UQGSSS (Graduate School Special Scholarship) (2007).

Selected Conference Lectures

• Framing 'Amal': Witnessing Asylum Seeker Testimony, 31 May 2012, Seminar CRS (Centre for Refugee Studies), York University, Toronto
• Gendered Life Narrative of Asylum Seekers in Australia, 16-18 May 2012, CARFMS, CRS: York University, Toronto.
• Life-Narrative of Muslim Women Asylum Seeker Subjects Beyond Archives, 3 August 2011, UQ Art Museum, University of Queensland, QLD, Australia.
• Living Archives: the Asylum Seeker Projects, 29 July 2011, EMSAH Seminar series, UQ Art Museum, University of Queensland.
• Translating Selves between Iran and America: Iranian Women’s Memoir. The Sixth Conference of International Auto/Biography Association (IABA), Honolulu, USA, 21-26 July 2008.
• Iranian Women’s Exilic Memoir Public seminar, The University of Queensland, 18 May 2007.
• Autobiography as a Meditation for Mother-daughter Subjectivity: Doris Lessing’s ‘Under My Skin’ and ‘Walking in the Shade’ The Fifth Conference of International Auto/Biography Association (IABA), Mainz, Germany, 26 July-4 August 2006.
• The Discourses of Gender, Nation, and Colonialists in Simin Daneshvar’s Writings, at Australian and International Feminisms Conference. Women College, University of Sydney, 13-14 December 2004.
• The Discourses of Gender, Nationality, and Coloniality in Savushun: A Novel about Modern Iran, Work in Progress Postgraduate Conference: Bad Ideas, English Department, The University of Queensland, 25-26 September 2004.
• Discourses of Veil: Azar Nafisi’s Reading ‘Lolita’ in Tehran, International Conference: Islam and Society: Perspectives and Prospects, The University of Queensland, September 3-4, 2004.

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