Amir Rakee

Amir Rakee is a PhD student in history and film studies working under the supervision of Dr Aydogan Kars and Dr Deane Williams. He holds two master’s degrees: one in Cinema from Tehran University of Art and another in History (Archival Documents and Records, and Codicology) from the University of Tehran. He also awarded a DAAD scholarship to study Iranian Studies at the University of Bamberg, Germany. Amir has translated several books from French and English into Persian in the fields of history and cinema. He has published an article derived from his master’s thesis, titled “Onomastics of Persepolis in Historical Documents and Texts: From the Beginnings to the Qajar Period” (Journal of Archaeological Studies, 2025).

Amir also possesses professional skills in copy editing, critical editing, cataloguing historical manuscripts, and reading and transcribing siaq documents. Alongside his academic pursuits, Amir has directed and edited a number of short films, documentaries, and video clips.

His PhD research at Monash brings together his two main fields of interest—cinema and history—through an interdisciplinary project entitled “Documentary Films as Visual Archives and Narratives of the History of Iran in the Late Qajar and Pahlavi Eras (1900–1979)”. This project examines the role of Iranian documentary cinema in recording modern Iranian history during the late Qajar and Pahlavi periods, exploring documentaries as both valuable historical archives and narrative tools for documenting and interpreting the past.