Foad Torshizi is an associate professor of Art History at RISD. He holds degrees in Comparative Literature and Society and Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (PhD and MPhil, Columbia University), Art History (MA, University of Minnesota), and Photography (MFA, Honar University of Tehran). Prior to joining the RISD faculty in 2017, he taught graduate students at Tehran University, advanced undergraduates and graduate students at the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy, as well as undergraduate students at Columbia University’s Core Curriculum.

Torshizi’s research interests lie in global contemporary art, contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, postcolonial theory, ethics of readership, theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism, comparative literature, and the politics of translation and interpretation. His research has been published in academic journals in both the US and Iran. Most recently, he published an article in Grey Room (MIT Press) titled “Loquacious Objects: Contemporary Iranian Art, Autotranslation, and the Readings of Benevolence.” Additionally, he has co-edited a special issue with ARTMargins (MIT Press) on Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Art, which was published in June 2023.

Torshizi is currently completing a manuscript tentatively titled Unreadings: Contemporary Iranian Art and Art History’s Monolingualism. The manuscript examines the ways in which Western disciplinary forms—and more specifically, art history and criticism—return home to circumscribe aesthetic diversity in Iran, demanding that the aesthetic economies of Iranian art align with Euro-American understandings of meaning, value, aspiration, and desire.