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Faculty Spotlight: Mejgan Massoumi

Mejgan Massoumi is an assistant professor in Â鶹´å’s Department of History. Her research and teaching interests are focused on connective histories of media, sound and popular culture, with a specific focus on Global South cultural circulations in poetry, music, memory and artistic resistance.

Tell me about your scholarly work.

At the heart of my work is this deep interest about how people stay connected, especially through music, literature and art, and during times of rupture or crisis.

My first book, tentatively titled “Radio Afghanistan: The Sounds of Kabul and the Remaking of a Modern Nation,” looks at the role of radio in everyday life in Afghanistan during the 1960s and 1970s. This was sort of a period of intense change. Political changes and radio became this powerful medium that shaped how people imagined and saw themselves and the world around them.

What's fascinating is that radio wasn't just about broadcasting news or government propaganda or messaging, it also played music and poetry that really resonated with people. So, you'd hear verses from world-famous Persianate poets like Rumi, Hafiz, Sadi and Bedil on the airwaves, and that created this shared cult experience across different communities. Radio connected listeners, not just within Afghanistan, but also to broader movements happening in Iran, the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia, and the wider Persianate world.

Even though radio was a state-controlled technology, it became a space for subtle resistance. For instance, creative producers used it to push back against authoritarianism of the time, to comment on Cold War politics, and to show solidarity with other global movements like civil rights and decolonization. A big part of my work highlights how these cultural producers used sound to create moments of connection and resistance that crossed borders.

Outside of my book, I also co-direct the Sonic Resistance Archive. This is a digital project that started about two years ago with my colleague, Munazza Ebtikar, at Oxford University, and Professor Robert Crews at Stanford University. We're creating a collection of Afghan music and poetry that has emerged in response to the Taliban's return to power in 2021. Most recently I helped bring the archive of Ustad Farida Mahwash — the first woman to be named Ustad (Master Musician) in Afghanistan — to Stanford Libraries. This is an archive that will be digitally and publicly accessible, and will hopefully serve as a resource for scholars, artists and members of the Afghan diaspora.

How is your scholarly work adding to the greater field?

My work contributes to a growing body of scholarship that centers non-western perspectives in media history and critical sound studies, while also rethinking how we understand Central and South Asia, and the broader Middle East.

By focusing on Afghanistan, I challenge this enduring colonial narrative that treats it as this space of exception defined by violence or supposed backwardness. This framing really erases Afghanistan's deep histories of cosmopolitanism and cultural production. Postcolonial scholars have long critiqued these reductive views in other parts of the Middle East and South Asia, and I bring that critique to Afghanistan, showing how it too has always been part of global and regional intellectual and artistic currents. My work highlights how Afghans have long engaged with art and technology and political thought. It also opens up new methodologies for studying history through forms like sound and for thinking critically about archives and memory and cultural preservation, especially in contexts shaped by displacement and censorship.

One of the key interventions of my work is to trace South-to-South connections — how Afghans were listening to artists and thinkers from across South Asia and the Middle East during the mid-20th century. At this time, even as nation states were trying to harden their borders and assert their uniqueness, music and radio tell a different story: one of convergence, where ideas and aesthetics moved across regions. My research ultimately asks us to reconsider how we map the Middle East and Central and South Asia, and who we center in its telling.

How did you become interested in this topic?

Like many in the diaspora, I've always been interested in how cultural memory survives especially when from the point of view of Afghanistan, so much of our history has been lost or erased or rewritten because there's been five decades of war and devastation there. For me, music serves as a connection to my cultural roots, and I wanted to explore that more. Eventually, that curiosity in music led to radio.

There's something for me that's very powerful about how intimate radio is yet how far it can reach. It can be a very personal experience, but it's also very far reaching in its ability to transmit sound. It connects people across distances and creates community.

At first, I approached radio as a historical question. I was curious to know how radio shapes everyday life, but pretty quickly it became personal. I started to realize that if we really want to understand this part of the world, its past and its future, we also need to pay attention to what we hear. And not just the music or the voices we hear, but also, what do the silences tell us?

There's so much history carried in, what people listened to, how they created, and how they remembered. And that's what drew me in. And it keeps me going with this work.

What are you most excited to accomplish as a faculty member at Â鶹´å?

In the more immediate future, I really look forward to publishing my first book, as I previously mentioned, on the history of radio in Afghanistan, also developing my second project on resistance music from the region. 

More broadly, I'm really excited to be at a place like Â鶹´å, where cross-disciplinary collaboration is very much encouraged. I love that my department is a combination of both scholars of history and anthropology. I'm really looking forward to teaching courses that bring together my interests in history, music and media, and cultural politics, and working with students who want to push boundaries and are curious to question received wisdom.

I'm also really hoping to build meaningful partnerships, not just across departments, but with communities outside the university as well. I understand that Pittsburgh is home to a growing Afghan diaspora that I hope to connect with.

What are your goals for the next generation of scholars?

In my training as a historian, my best professors taught me to feel confident asking big and difficult questions, and to do that with care, with thoughtfulness and creativity. So that's what I would also like to help my own students develop, whether they go on to work in academia or in more public-facing spaces.

I want them to feel empowered, to challenge the stories we've inherited and to build new kinds of knowledge, ones that come from their own experiences, ones that are grounded and responsible and transformative.

Most importantly, my goal for the next generation of scholars is to help them understand the value of empathy. I can come to see empathy as not just a tool for studying the past. It's something we absolutely need to carry into the present, especially in a world where cultural conflict, racism and injustice are still so present. At its best, I think scholarship should help us see each other more clearly, and maybe even more generously.