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 crises, 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 imperial wars, resource extraction, climate change, and ecological destruction. Her work draws on decolonial and anti-extractive methodologies rooted in ancestral and Indigenous practices of listening, sensing, and storytelling—approaches through which she thinks with, listens to, 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 writing has been published in Art Journal and PUBLIC, among others.
Thesis Title: TBD
Supervisor: Dr. Balbir K. Singh
Research Interests:
- Decolonial Art History
- Art and Ecological Justice
- Feminist & Queer Theory of Colour Critique
- Contemporary Art
- Visual & Im/Material Cultures of West Asia
- Archival Studies
- Indigenous Methodologies
Research Assistantships:
- Dark Opacities Lab, Dr. Balbir K. Singh, 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 (Oct 2025). “Ornament is Not Innocent”, UAAC Annual Conference, Session Chair, York University, Toronto, Canada.
- Rashvand, Somayeh (Oct 2025). “Memory Work through Abstraction in Diasporic Iranian Visual Art”, UAAC Annual Conference, York University, Toronto, Canada.
- Rashvand, Somayeh (June 2025). “Relinking Myth & Memory: Multimedia Art Strategies as Alternative Knowledge Production.” Canadian Sociological Association Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada.
- Rashvand, Somayeh (June 2025). “Precarious Smiles: Invisible Labour of Diasporic Craftswomen in Contemporary Art Production in Canada.” Canadian Sociological Association Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada.
- Rashvand, Somayeh (Apr 2025). “Precarious Smiles: Invisible Labour of Diasporic Craftswomen in Contemporary Art Production in Canada.” Visual Arts, Narrative, and Social Class Conference, Turku, Finland.
- Rashvand, Somayeh (Apr 2025). “Distant Mourning, Queer Care: Po. B. K. Lomami’s Affective Journey Through Performance.” AGIC 2025, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.