Email: fa1944@hunter.cuny.edu
Office: Room 522 Hunter North
Phone: 212-772-4246
Fall 2026 Office Hours: TBA
Farzad Amoozegar is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist whose research spans religion, ethics, sound, death and dying, disability, and political life, with a particular focus on Iran and the broader Islamic world. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with Iranian musicians, Syrian refugee children, and disabled veterans of the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War, he explores the lived consequences of loss, suffering, displacement and social change.
His work engages broader questions of ethical formation, religious thought, and the transmission of knowledge across generations. He investigates how ongoing relationships with the dead shape the ethical lives of the living, giving rise to enduring obligations that continue to inform how they understand themselves, relate to others and inhabit the world. Amoozegar’s research brings Islamic philosophy and ethics into conversation with postcolonial and decolonial thought to reconsider personhood, responsibility, and the intellectual traditions through which people understand and shape their relations with others.
Publications
His first book, Being with the Dead: Iranian Veterans and the Enduring Bond with Their Fallen Comrades (Cambridge University Press), is an ethnographic study of Iranian veterans who maintain ongoing relationships with childhood friends who died during the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War. Through Qurʾānic recitation, prayer, Persian poetry, and everyday practices of remembrance, the book examines how the dead remain present in the lives of the living and how grief can become an enduring ethical and spiritual relationship.
He is currently working on his second book, Bodies of Sacrifice, Voices of Reckoning: Iranian Paraplegic Veterans and the Unmaking of a Political Theology, which examines sacrifice, martyrdom, disability, care, and political authority in postwar Iran. The project develops the concept of grounded political theology to explore how veterans draw on Islamic ethical traditions and their lived experiences of war and disability to evaluate political authority and articulate what institutions owe to those who have sacrificed. It considers how wounded bodies become sites of ethical and political critique, raising fundamental questions about responsibility, justice, reciprocity, and political obligation.
His articles have appeared in Ethos, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropological Quarterly, Current Anthropology and Anthropology and Humanism.
ORCID: 0000-0003-1989-0085
Teaching
He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in music and anthropology, as well as Hunter College Honors courses in Ethics and Biotechnology and Mind, Medicine, and Culture. He mentors students in the Mellon Public Humanities and Social Justice Scholars Program, supervises M.A. theses at Hunter College, and advises Ph.D. dissertations at The Graduate Center.
Music
He studied the tār and setār with musicians Mohammad-Reżā Loṭfī, Hooshang Zarīf, and ʿAṭā-Allāh Jankūk.
Education
Ph.D., Anthropology — University of California, Los Angeles
Ph.D., Ethnomusicology — University of California, Los Angeles
M.A., Anthropology — University of British Columbia
M.A., Musicology — University of British Columbia
B.A. — University of Toronto
