Dalia Davoudi

Dalia Davoudi is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute. She works in the fields of American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory, and Black and ethnic studies. Her current book project, Claustrophilia in the Open: Perverse Technologies of Enclosure, argues that literature and film from the nineteenth-century to the present respond to the proliferating mediations of global capitalism by producing internal forms of enclosure—stages, frames, homes, archives, and metatexts —as bounded spaces where meaning and affect can take shape. Against ideals of openness, mobility, and transparency, these works cultivate provisional enclosures that make play, contradiction, and collective feeling possible.

Dr. Davoudi was previously a National Endowments for the Humanities Fellow, and her work has recently been published in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and Radical Teacher. In addition to publishing in traditional scholarly forms, Davoudi maintains a compositional practice with experimental video essays.

Davoudi is the co-founder of the Cultural Research and Practice Lab.