Roxanne Varzi is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is a core faculty member of the Culture and Theory PHD program, and the Working Group in African and Middle Eastern Studies. She is an affiliated faculty member of the
Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, Religious Studies, and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies. She is also on the editorial board of The Journal of Media Sociology.

She was born in Iran to an American mother and Iranian father and migrated with her family to the U.S shortly after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Dr. Varzi first returned to Iran in 1991 while on a year abroad at the American University in Cairo. When she graduated from the American University in Washington D.C in 1993, she returned to Iran for a year to live with her uncle’s family in Tehran. When she returned to the states, she wrote a memoir called Majnun’s Mask, from which three chapters have been published as short stories.

In 1995 she began graduate school in Persian Literature before deciding to study Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. In 2000 she was awarded the first Fulbright for research in Iran since the Iranian Revolution. She completed her PhD in 2002 and was awarded a two year Woodrow Wilson fellowship that gave her a post-doctoral teaching and research fellowship at New York University’s International Center for Advanced Studies.

In 2005 Dr Varzi became the youngest senior Iranian visiting Fellow to St Antony’s College, Oxford University in the United Kingdom and was at the same time a member of the faculty of Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African studies, University of London. She is currently working on another book project about art and war in post-war Iran and finishing her documentary film. She lives in Irvine with her husband.