Azadeh Safaeian is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). Her research and teaching interests include disability and trauma studies, care studies, postcolonial environmental humanities, animal studies, and film theory. Located at the intersection of critical disability studies and trauma theory, her current book project attends to the discursive and non-discursive representations of psychosomatic traumas in the literatures and cinemas of minority groups in the context of the Middle East. She has a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University, a B.A. in English Literature from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, and a B.S. in Biology from Azad University of Mashhad.