Zahra Tavana
Zahra Tavana (She/ Her)
Ph.D. Student
Education: M.A. in English Literature, University of Guilan, Iran
B.A. in English Literature, University of Guilan, Iran
Interests: Refugee/ Immigrant Studies, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Life Writing,
Critical
Human Rights Studies, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Zahra Feizbakhsh Tavana completed both her B.A. and M.A. in English Literature at the University of Guilan in northern Iran, near the Caspian Sea. Beginning in 2012, she taught English as a second language in both Guilan and Tehran at various institutes and language academies, where she also taught IELTS preparation courses. She consistently updated her teaching methods through professional development programs offered by institutions such as Shahid Beheshti University and Cambridge University. She is now a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of Houston. Her research focuses on migrant studies, refugee and undocumented life writing, ethics of care, literature and law, and critical human rights studies. Working across the Persian diaspora, Latinx immigrant narratives, and other global sites of displacement, she examines how memoirists theorize borderization, state power, embodiment, and the politics of narrative legibility. She analyzes memoir and testimonio as “out-law” genres through which displaced subjects claim narrative agency beyond institutional scripts of trauma, gratitude, innocence, or redemption. At the University of Houston, she designs her courses around questions of migration, violence, the human condition, and phenomenology of the body.
She also holds a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Zahra has presented her research at several conferences, including Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Austin, and she is the recipient of the 2024–2025 Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Houston, a university-wide honor. In addition to her scholarly work, she translates the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad, with translations published in The Kenyon Review and several others currently under review.