Kaveh Askari is Mercator Fellow at Configurations of Films in November 2024.

He is a professor in the Department of English and Director of the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University. He is the author of Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit (Univ. of California Press, 2022) which was awarded the 2023 Katherine Singer Kovács Society for Cinema and Media Studies Book Award and was longlisted for the 2023 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. Before this he authored Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood (BFI, 2014) and co-edited several volumes including a special issue of Film History titled South by South/West Asia: Transregional Histories of Middle East—South Asia Cinemas (2021) and Performing New Media, 1890-1915 (2014).

Dr. Askari has contributed work to Cinema Journal, Screen, Critical Inquiry, Frameworks, Film History, Early Popular Visual Culture, and to edited collections on topics including early art cinema, media circulation, cross-media studies of the moving image, and cinemas of the Middle East. He served on the executive committee for Domitor, the International Society of Early Cinema Studies, on the jury for the Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival, and on multiple committees for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies including co-chair of the SCMS Middle East Caucus. He also has collaborated with curators and archivists to preserve films from public archives and private collections including early 16mm American amateur experiments and narrative features made in Iran in the 1950s and 1960s.

His current research includes projects on the technologies and collective labor of the dubbed voice in 1960s and a larger project on cinema’s intersections with institutions of broadcasting and education around the Indian Ocean during a period of UNESCO-supported internationalism.