Instructor Spotlight: Omid Bagherli

Tell us about your background and what inspired you to teach this course

I’m a PhD Candidate in the English department at Tufts. While the history of hysteria in medicine, feminism, and literature is a component of my dissertation research, the idea for the class came into place when I appreciated just how elastic the terms “hysteria” and “hysterical” really are. While these terms obviously have a highly gendered history, they can describe a wide range of emotions, performances, and group dynamics—from large incidences of psychosomatic disorders (like fatigue or laughing fits) to mass panics or political scares around novel social matters (typically to do with gender, sexuality, race, class, and technology). I wanted to explore these two under defined terms and the representational tropes that held them together.

Your course looks at hysteria through a historical lens. What patterns does your course examine? How have ideas and representations of hysteria, anxiety, and paranoia changed in the recent past? 

This class is interested in two social patterns: how supposedly “deviant” phenomena become demonized or pathologized by the media to produce a moral panic, and how people communicate discontent (or desire) from within repressive or dysfunctional contexts through unconscious behaviors.

These two patterns have been around for a long time—just think of The Salem Witch Trials and Strasbourg’s Dancing Plague of 1518. What we’re interested in, though, is how mass media has accelerated, reanimated, or modified these group dynamics. In the age of viral media (and viral pandemics!), how do we talk about contagious social anxieties and how do we represent the desires of discontented groups? These questions require us to turn to popular culture and the way it represents “susceptible” or “agitated” groups and the undue influences of mass media.

How did you introduce the topic in your first class?

In our first class, we paired Alice Guy’s silent film Le Piano irrésistible (1907) with the music video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983) to see how pop culture often provides commentary on its own attempts to entice and excite a large audience. I think that this pairing helped ground the advanced ideas of the class and allowed students to start thinking of contemporary examples that might be doing something similar. Let’s hope that the rest of the semester goes just as well!

Is there a particular film or novel you’re looking forward to teaching?

I’m excited to see what the students make of Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic essay on Beatlemania, “Screams Heard Round the World” (1986), and how they will adapt its argument to present-day fan culture. I’m also hoping that Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s mesmerizing film Cure (1997) — one of my all-time favorites— provokes a discussion about the strange relationship between hypnotic suggestion, film, and desire.

Your final project involves students creating a “pop-cultural artifact.” Can you give an example of this/what your students might be creating? 

Since we’ll be looking at how countercultural groups express discontent, rebellion, and protest, I thought that I’d encourage students to produce a zine on a topic of their choice. This would allow them to explain a misunderstood phenomenon, while also confronting the challenges of arranging and transmitting ideas in a creative, lo-fi medium.

Omid Bagherli is a PhD candidate in Tufts’ English Department. Originally from the UK, his dissertation studies contemporary works of film and literature which explore lost and hidden histories. He works with psychoanalytic and feminist theories to understand various forms of mental and social suppression.