The Ajam Media Collective is an online space devoted to highlighting the myriad cultural contributions, both high and low, of Iranian, Central Asian, and Diaspora communities. We seek to unite authors from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to promote a new view of the region, emphasizing its importance as a thriving cultural center.

For more information regarding the blog, please contact us at ajammc@gmail.com.

About the Authors

Alex Shams is a bacheye Los Angeles, a fact he has spent years trying to deny. Raised in the diaspora but with frequent summers in Shemiran, he first became interested in regional politics after being chased out of a history class debate at his evangelical middle school during the Iraq War. Since then, he has divided his time between Los Angeles, Beirut, Tehran, and, most recently, Boston. He focuses on urban planning, gender studies, and political activism in Iran and the Arab World.

Marian Smith began learning Arabic senior year at her high school in Albany, New York and to this day has a soft spot for the Egyptian dialect. In college, a course on Sufism sparked her interest in Persian language and she hasn’t looked back since. She has lived in Egypt and traveled extensively in the Middle East and Africa. Her research focuses on medieval Persian literature, material culture, and aesthetic production in the Timurid period. If the technology for time travel existed, she would go back to late 15th century Herat and participate in the poetic circles there.

Rustin Zarkar spent his childhood in a Miniver Cheevy-esque mindset and aspired to study archaeology. As an undergraduate, he became interested in Persian fiction and soon found himself studying the contemporary era. Rustin’s research focuses on poster art, Iranian visual culture, and leftism in the Middle East. He has traveled to Iran and Tajikistan and enjoys contemporary literature, cinema, and a good khoresh.

Elise Burton, after doing two years of hard time studying Arabic in undergrad, emerged to embrace all things non-Arab in the Middle East, with a special passion for analyzing Iranian, Israeli, and Turkish national culture. If her vacillations between Farsi, Hebrew, and Turkish already seem confusing, discovering her checkered past in genetics labs and costume designing won’t help matters, but it does explain her (nascent) ridiculous dissertation on “Genetic Nationalism: Ethnic Myths of Biological Research in Iran, Turkey and Israel.” Ready to make a willing foreigner a killer khoreshte bademjan in exchange for a passport that has a prayer of getting an Iranian visa.

If you would like to be a contributor, please send an email to ajammc@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you.