Email: fa1944@hunter.cuny.edu
Office: Room 522 Hunter North
Phone: 212-772-4246
Fall 2022 Office Hours: Th 5:30-6:30pm and by appointments (in-person or zoom)
Farzad Amoozegar is an ethnomusicologist and a psychological/medical anthropologist interested in how the experiences of listening to and performing Islamic sung prayers relate to death, dying and grief; ethics of care; and warfare, violence and militarism. His research extends the conversation concerning listening and performing into an intersubjective and ethical relationship between the living and the dead by inquiring into ways in which paraplegic Iranian veterans of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War (ethnomusicology) and Syrian refugee children (anthropology) process violence and suffering and how they cope with the loss of family members or close friends.
He is interested in how music-making, musical sound, and noise effect the individual’s psychological, spiritual and ethical domains; health and wellness (the clinical and alternative medicine context of healing, illness and disease); caregiving and the healthcare system; warfare, violence and trauma; and death and dying.
His current book project, Being with the Dead: Islamic Sung Prayer, Listening and Ethical Praxis (University of Chicago Press), is an ethnographic study of four paraplegic Iranian veterans of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. It explores how listening to monājāt (Islamic sung prayers) centers on the particularity of the sound quality known for its mystical experience and spiritual longing.
His interest in listening, performance, phenomenology, ethics and Islamic philosophy were developed during his university education first in Canada and then in the United States, as well as through his extensive musical training which began during his childhood in Iran. He spent his formative years in Iran playing the tār and setār before immigrating to Canada at the age of twelve. He continued his musical studies under master musicians, Mohammad-Rezā Lotfī, Hooshang Zarif and Ata-Allāh Jankouk. He has performed in diverse venues across North America, Europe and the Middle East.
Ph.D. Anthropology (UCLA); Ph.D. Ethnomusicology (UCLA); M.A. Anthropology (UBC); M.A. in Musicology (UBC); and B.A. at the University of Toronto.
