Elham Golpushnezhad
Education
- Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, Griffith University, Australia (2012–2017) — Dissertation: “Rapping Islam: A Comparative Study of Hip-Hop Culture in Indonesia, Tunisia, and the United States”; Supervisors: Prof. Andy Bennett and Prof. Christine Barrett
- M.A. in Cultural Studies, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran (2008–2011) — Dissertation: “An Ethnographic Study of Iranian Youth Hip-Hop Culture”
- B.A. in English Literature, Shiraz University, Iran (2003–2007)
Research Interests
- Hip-hop culture in Muslim-majority countries; youth culture, gender, and sexuality; method and theory in cultural studies; critical race theory and postcolonial theory; posthumanism and transhumanism; inquiry-based pedagogy; popular music heritage and transnational media flows.
Biography
Dr. Elham Golpushnezhad has been Assistant Professor of Communication and Design at Habib University since January 2026. She joins Habib from Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco, where she was Assistant Professor of Media and Communication (August 2024–2025), designing and teaching courses including Fundamentals of Communication Studies, Media Policy and the Global South, Transnational Media Flows, and Hip Hop and Postcolonial Societies. Before that, she was Senior Lecturer in Communication, Media and Cultural Studies at SAE University College, Australia (January 2016–August 2024), coordinating and developing content for its Cultural Studies and Media Unit.
Dr. Golpushnezhad’s interdisciplinary research examines the intersections of music, identity, resistance, and political economy in Muslim-majority contexts, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Iran, Indonesia, Tunisia, and the United States to analyze how hip-hop functions as a platform for symbolic resistance and cultural negotiation among marginalized youth.
Selected Publications
- “From the left to the right, from the fringe to the centre: The trajectories of Iran’s DIY hip-hop culture,” DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society, 1(3), 2023.
- “Untold Stories of DIY/underground Iranian rap culture: the legitimization of Iranian hip-hop and the loss of radical potential,” Cultural Sociology, 12(2), 2018.
- Golpushnezhad, E., and Barone, S. “On n’est pas à vendre. L’économie politique du rap dans la Tunisie postrévolution.” Politique Africaine, 141, 2016.
- “Queering Tehran: Discovering Gay Rap in Iran,” in Lost Histories of Youth Culture, Peter Lang, 2014.
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