Biography Kamran Rastegar is Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literatures and a member of the faculty of the International Literary and Visual Studies program at Tufts University. Rastegar received his PhD in 2005 from Columbia University, awarded jointly in Comparative Literature and Society, and Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures, and has held prior appointments at Brown University (2005-2006) and the University of Edinburgh (2006-2009).