Katayoun Matloubi

Research Associate at Brandeis University

Katayoun Matloubi is a scholar of French and Francophone Studies and the theorist of rhetorics of obliquity. Her work examines the intersection of gendered memory, visual culture, and the ethics of testimony. She earned her PhD from the University of Connecticut, where she also holds a Graduate Certificate in Human Rights. Her research investigates how historical catastrophe is represented through oblique strategies—fragmentation, silence, and narrative restraint—that resist the voyeuristic objectification of suffering.

As a Research Associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Dr. Matloubi is developing her monograph, Remembering Through Obliquity: Gendered Strategies of Silence, Visuality, and Ethical Withholding. During the period of her appointment, she analyzes the postwar literary trilogy of Anna Langfus in dialogue with contemporary cinema to articulate a cross-media grammar of indirect testimony. Her current work also creates a bridge with the HBI exhibition Who Will Draw Our History?, exploring how Jewish women across media use symbolic compression and selective omission to sustain the transmission of memory when indexical records are absent.

Dr. Matloubi’s scholarship engages with the ethics of representation in the digital age, particularly the impact of AI and digital discourse on the distortion of historical narratives. Her work has been recognized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Patti Parlette Peace Prize. A multilingual scholar, she conducts research in French, German, Azeri, Persian, English, and Ottoman Turkish.