Staff profile

Yasaman Taheri is a PhD Candidate in Italian Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, and a Fellow at the Center for Medical Humanities. Her doctoral project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Northern Bridge Consortium, is a comparative and interdisciplinary study of the literary depiction of contemporary motherhood, with a particular focus on representations of traumatized mother figures. Using the cultural, social, political, and psychological forces embedded in the writings of contemporary Mediterranean and Middle Eastern female authors as a starting point, she explores the interrelation of motherhood dynamics, the literary representation of trauma and memory, female agency, and sexuality. Her interdisciplinary approach is based on the idea that social relations and cultural values can shed light on concepts such as fragmented motherhood and intergenerational trauma. Before beginning her PhD, she worked for three years as a research assistant at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tehran, where she ranked first nationally in the master's entrance examination in Literary Studies. 

• Motherhood Studies
• Maternal Storytelling
• Cinematic Representation of Motherhood
• Mother/Child dynamics
• Transnational Feminism
• Comparative Literature
• Contemporary Women’s Writings

Chapter in book

• Exploring the Complexity of Italian Motherhood on Screen: From Contestation to Identity Formation
  
  Taheri, Y., & Poursanati, S. (2025). Exploring the Complexity of Italian Motherhood on Screen: From Contestation to Identity Formation. In S. Liddy & D. Flynn (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Motherhood on Screen. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003389712-6

Conference Paper

• Representation of Guilt in the Neapolitan Narrator: Critical Discourse Analysis of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels
  
  Taheri, Y. (2025, October 27). Representation of Guilt in the Neapolitan Narrator: Critical Discourse Analysis of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels [Conference paper]. Presented at Memory, Guilt, and Shame – 4th International Interdisciplinary Conference, Poland.
• Transgressed Reality: Toward a New Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Chaos of the Senses.
  
  Taheri, Y., & Salami, A. (2022, November 25). Transgressed Reality: Toward a New Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Chaos of the Senses [Conference paper]. Presented at .” Creating a World without Violence Against Women and Girls: An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Role of the Arts, Queen University of Belfast.
• Liberated Indigenous Heroine: A Postcolonial Feminist Study of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun
  
  Taheri, Y., & Salami, A. (2022, October 1). Liberated Indigenous Heroine: A Postcolonial Feminist Study of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun [Conference paper]. Presented at International Conference on Totalitarianism in Literature and Film, University of Economics and Humanities, Bielsko-Biała.