Ph.D. student Milad Azarm helps rewrite theater history with groundbreaking research

Milad Azarm has resided in Athens less than four years but has already made a lasting impact on the town’s theatrical community and the academic world. The Interdisciplinary Arts Ph.D. student was born and raised in Iran, where he received his undergraduate and graduate degrees before pursuing an American doctorate program in theater arts.

“I was communicating with different universities, and I received similar admissions from different universities, but when I did an interview with Dr. Cornish…he was a super nice guy,” Azarm said. “After that meeting I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go there.”

Matthew Cornish is an associate professor of Theater History and the chair of Azarm’s dissertation committee. Serving as the key advisor on the student’s final project is a full circle moment for Cornish, who has observed Azarm through the duration of his program.

“It was just immediately apparent that he was a really smart guy, a hard worker and learning a lot,” Cornish said. “He gets really into certain projects, and he’ll find information that nobody else has found on this stuff before by looking at deeper sources or unusual sources or accessing archives that people haven’t accessed before.”

Azarm’s dissertation focuses on postmodern theater, a concept he was introduced to in one of Cornish’s classes.

“I found that around 1970 and onward, a new form of theater emerged in the United States from the works of Robert Wilson and The Wooster Group,” Azarm said. “I found that those are completely different from dramatic, classical structures. Then, I tried to understand whether we still are in that period of the post-dramatic era or not.”

In addition to working on his dissertation, Azarm continues to publish articles in outlets that Cornish deems “really high-level journals,” which he said is not the norm for most students at Azarm’s level. One of his upcoming publications focuses on Ta’ziyeh, an annual Iranian performance of ritual dramatic art.

“It was processions at first but gradually evolved to dramatic form and now it has music, dialogues and everything,” Azarm said. “Most Western scholars have written a lot about Ta’ziyeh, but they misunderstood and they didn’t have access to new resources. I tried to connect to archives back in Iran and find new materials, and then corrected those misconceptions or misunderstandings due to a lack of resources.”

This upcoming article will “change how people tell theater history,” according to Cornish, who teaches about Ta’ziyeh in many of his classes.

“This is a story that is taught around the English-speaking world about a particular theater in Iran and we just have the story wrong, and his upcoming publication will correct the story, add depth to it and change the way that people actually teach undergraduates in the U.S. and elsewhere,” Cornish said.

Much to Cornish’s delight, Azarm strives to get a job that will allow him to continue teaching after he finishes his dissertation.

“I love teaching,” Azarm said. “Every day I have a class is completely different after finishing my class, because I feel a lot of energy coming from my students, and a lot of fun.”

The students under Azarm’s instruction receive an incredibly unique perspective in the classroom, one that draws connections between Iranian and American theater that Azarm has internalized through years studying both forms.

“Each of these performances…challenge our understanding about our culture, our identity,” he said. “They seem to be in different, separated cosmos, but they do the same thing in terms of challenging our understanding about cultural biases, about identity, about our history.”