Biography
Maryam Athari is an inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow at Tulane’s Global Humanities Center. She earned her PhD in 2024 from Northwestern University and was previously an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn's Wolf Humanities Center. An art historian of twentieth-century global modernisms, she focuses on Middle Eastern and Iranian modern art, with an emphasis on transregional and transmedial exchanges. Her work also engages with modern Iraqi photography and architecture, as well as contemporary photographic practices across the Middle East. She has contributed to curatorial departments at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the National Gallery of Art; and the Menil Collection, and is an alumna of the Center for Curatorial Leadership. At Tulane, she continues developing her book manuscript, Nodes of Connectivity: Jahani and the Worlding of Modern Iranian Art, 1953–1979.