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Dr. Iraj Omidvar
Contact Information
Office: J335
Phone: 678-915-3722
iomidvar@spsu.edu
Iraj Omidvar is an assistant professor in the
Department of English, Technical Communication, and Media Arts.
He completed his Ph.D. in 2004 in rhetoric and professional
communication with a concentration in philosophy from Iowa State
University of Science and Technology, where he also had received an
M.A. in English and a B.A. in literary studies with a minor in German.
For the last eight years, he has taught traditional,
multicultural, cross-cultural, and English-as-a-second-language
sections of college composition; courses in world literature and modern
Arab literature in translation; advanced courses in business writing,
technical communication, and professional editing; and English grammar
for education majors.
In summer 2006, he taught English in a six-week
study-abroad program in Tunisia. And in fall 2007, he was back in Tunisia on a
Fulbright, teaching translation, modern American
poetry, and U.S. civilization at Faculty of Letters and Humanities, University of Sfax, where he was also asked
to offer graduate seminars on rhetoric and disciplinarity.
His cross-disciplinary research explores
alternatives to objectivist theories of knowledge, which historically
have served to perpetuate a range of authoritarian structures such as
slavery, patriarchy, and colonialism as well as to draw sharp
conceptual divisions between the humanities and technical fields. The
goal of his research is to understand social conditions in which good
ideas can be formed through communication of views by heterogeneous
groups of people. An area of his studies is intercultural translation,
whether between people of various nationalities, cultures, and
languages or between public (in literature and journalism) and
professional and expert languages in modern industrial societies. For
example, he is studying how Europeans and colonized societies viewed
each other, what scholars in humanities and technical fields understand
about each other’s specialties, and how publics in democracies
can exercise oversight on experts and professionals.
Among his publications are “Limits of
Countering Stereotypes Through the Use of Visual Rhetoric: A Study of
Photographs of Iran,” in Writing the Visual: A Practical Guide
for Teachers of Composition and Communication, Parlor Press
(2007), and, with colleagues, “Critical Thinking and
Problem Solving in Engineering: Revisiting John Dewey's Ideas for
Evaluating Engineering Education,” in Proceedings of the American
Society for Engineering Education 2003 Annual Conference, June
2003. He has also published or will shortly publish translations
of modern Persian poetry in journals such as New Letters, Poetry
Review, Tampa Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Puerto del Sol.
While in Tunisia in spring 2007, he gave three
talks. At the 7th Annual Americana Conference, he gave the keynote
speech and presented “Translator in the Borderlands:
Translation Theory and Gloria Anzaldua's Mestiza Consciousness.”
At the International Conference on Silence, he presented “The
Unheard Melody of an Unsung Woman Warrior: Translating the Ancient Epic
of Lady Goshasp across Cultures and Epochs.” He also gave the
invited talk “The Problem and Promise of E Pluribus Unum: Iranian
Americans, Migrancy, and Multivalence” at Reading 21st Century
America sponsored by the American Study Days.
Dr. Omidvar was born and raised in Iran. He
attended high school in the former West Germany, and has lived in the
United States for more than twenty years. He is fluent in
English, Persian, and German and is working on his Arabic.
Courses
Dr. Omidvar specializes in the
following courses offered by the ETCMA department:
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