Student profile
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Somayeh Rashvand
Somayeh Rashvand is an art historian, craftswoman, and interdisciplinary scholar currently pursuing her doctoral studies in Art History at Concordia University. Her research is broadly concerned with art, aesthetics, planetary crisis, and questions of social and ecological justice. She is especially interested in the ways in which the aesthetic realm becomes a site of queer, defiant, and insurgent knowledge production, sensibility, and speculative world-making to encounter the dystopian moment marked by wars, authoritarianism, resource extraction, and ecological destruction. Her work draws on anti-colonial and anti-extractive methodologies rooted in ancestral and Indigenous practices of listening, sensing, and storytelling, approaches through which she listens to, thinks with, and imagines alongside artists and their aesthetic practices. Before beginning her PhD at Concordia, she was a university lecturer in Iran for more than a decade, where she taught a wide range of courses on theories and methods in art history. Her writings have been published in Art Journal and PUBLIC, among others. Her doctoral research is supported by the SSHRC CGS Doctoral Scholarship. She is also the recipient of the FRQSC and PBEEE doctoral scholarships from the Fonds de recherche du Québec.
Thesis Title: TBD
Supervisor: Dr. Balbir K. Singh
Research Interests:
- Art and Philosophy
- Art and Planetary Crisis
- Archival Studies
- Visual & Im/Material Cultures of West Asia
- Anticolonial and Indigenous Methodologies
Research Assistantships:
- Dark Opacities Lab, Dr. Balbir K. Singh, Jan 2025- Present.
Teaching Assistantships:
- ARTH 201 and 202- Perspectives of Art History, 2025-2026.
- ARTH 354 Studies in Interdisciplinarity in the Visual Arts, Summer 2025.
- ARTH 201 and 202 Perspectives of Art History, 2024-2025
Selected Publications
- Rashvand, Somayeh (2025). Language as a Surrogate for Home: The Material Afterlife of Persian Script in Diasporic Iranian Art. Public: Art/Culture/Ideas 72 (Searching for Home): 86–96.
- Rashvand, Somayeh (2025). Book Review of Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics by Salar Mameni (Duke University Press, 2023). Solicited by Art Journal 84 (4): 98–100.
- Rashvand, Somayeh (2025). Screensavers. Exhibition essay for Po B. K. Lomami. OPTICA.
Selected Conferences
- Rashvand, Somayeh (May 2026). “Reparative Archives in the Works of Parastou Forouhar”, Annual Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference, McGill University, Montreal.
- Rashvand, Somayeh (October 2025). “Ornament is Not Innocent”, UAAC Annual Conference, Session Chair, York University, Toronto.
- Rashvand, Somayeh (October 2025). “Memory Work through Abstraction in Diasporic Iranian Visual Art”, UAAC Annual Conference, York University, Toronto.
- Rashvand, Somayeh (June 2025). “Relinking Myth & Memory: Multimedia Art Strategies as Alternative Knowledge Production.” Canadian Sociological Association Annual Conference, Toronto.
- Rashvand, Somayeh (April 2025). “Precarious Smiles: Invisible Labour of Diasporic Craftswomen in Contemporary Art Production in Canada.” Visual Arts, Narrative, and Social Class Conference, Turku, Finland.