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Amir Moosavi is currently completing his PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He holds an MA in Near Eastern Studies from NYU and a BA in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Broadly speaking, his interests include the development of the novel in modern Arabic and Persian literatures, war and cultural production, and Arabic and Persian language pedagogy. During the 2013-14 academic year he was visiting instructor of Arabic language and literature at Bard College and during the 2014-15 academic year he will be a fellow at the NYU Humanities Initiative.Amir Moosavi's project:Cities at War: The City, Writer and the Limits of the Fiction from the Iran-Iraq WarMy proposal for the EUME 2014 Summer Academy is based on my dissertation, currently in progress, entitled “Reimagining a War: Negotiating Ideology and Disenchantment in Literary Narratives of the Iran-Iraq War.” In it, I treat literature produced by the Iran-Iraq War in Arabic and Persian prose-fiction. I establish a comparative context for understanding the official cultures of war sponsored by the Iraqi Ba’thist regime and the Islamic Republic of Iran during the 1980s and the ways that official government-sponsored narratives of the war used by both regimes affected cultural production at that time and in the postwar era. Through close readings of literary texts, I then demonstrate how writers in Iran and Iraq have attempted to subvert, through literature, authoritarian discourses that exploit religion and nationalism in both countries. In doing so, I create a comparative framework for understanding literary production in Iran and Iraq, and more generally, between modern Arabic and Persian literatures.For the project at hand, I hope to explore the relationships between the literary writer, official state narratives, and the rewriting of war in the context of the war-torn cities of the Iran-Iraq War. By focusing on prose-fiction written primarily in the postwar period, my project will demonstrate how writers from Iran and Iraq have used the city and memory of the war as a site to challenge the ideologies of official literature and propaganda, turning war literature in the urban setting into a literature of mourning and trauma.&#160;