Dr. Negar Mottahedeh is a cultural critic and film theorist specializing in interdisciplinary and feminist contributions to Middle Eastern Studies and Film & Media Studies. Negar Mottahedeh is renowned for her work on Iranian Cinema and has published extensively on topics including the history of reform and revolution, `Abdu’l-Baha’s vision of human solidarity and peace in the 20th Century, Bábism, Qajar history, performance traditions in Iran, the history of technology, and visual theory. She has also written on the women’s protests that emerged immediately after the Iranian Revolution in Kate Millett in Iran (2019), and contributed articles to Observer on topics such as Trump’s travel ban and the persecution of Jews and Baháʼís in Iran (2017).

With the publication of #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life (2015), she expanded her focus to the cultures and practices of the web, exploring the political efficacy of hashtags, selfies, memes, and digital tribes in The Hill (2017). She has written about internet security and Iranian hacker culture in WIRED magazine (2017),  Majid Tavakoli and the 2010 Men in Scarves Movement, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and anti-disciplinarity in Feminist Futures (2023) and the role of analogue and digital media in Iranian protests movements between 1979-2022 in the Wall Street Journal (2022).

Negar Mottahedeh received her Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Minnesota. She has taught at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, and Pratt Institue in Brooklyn, New York . In 2002, she began teaching at Duke University, where she is a Full Professor in the Program in Literature, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the Program in Cinematic Arts.