Nacim Pak-Shiraz

Professor Nacim Pak-Shiraz is Personal Chair of Cinema and Iran, and Head of Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Nacim has also curated a number of film festivals in Edinburgh, and has been a jury member and speaker at several international film festivals in the Czech Republic, Turkey and Iran. Her research focuses on cinema and visual culture in the Middle East, particularly Iran. She is interested in:

• Representations and constructions of gender in visual culture
• The Iranian performing arts and religion
• Contemporary expressions of Islam in art and material culture. 

She is currently working on Women’s Depiction of Freedom of Movement in Iranian cinema.  Her notable outputs include:

• Making Space: Women and Freedom of Movement (2022): open access video essay
• Shi'i Islam in Iranian Cinema: Religion and Spirituality in Film (2011). This is the only monograph examining the engagement of film with Islam to date, sparking debate about cinema’s compatibility with religion and spirituality.
• The special issue Visualizing Iran: From Antiquity to the Present, which Nacim edited. 
•  Shooting the isolation and marginality of masculinities in Iranian cinema (2017), and Constructing masculinities through Javanmardsin pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, (2018) in which she examined the constructions of masculinity in Iranian cinema.
• Making Space: Women and Freedom of Movement (2022) open access video essay: https://edin.ac/3PZr2Wj