Nima Bassiri comes to the Department of Rhetoric’s Film Studies program after an outstanding undergraduate performance at the University of Chicago, where he completed a double major in Psychology and Cinema/ Media Studies. Bassiri’s senior thesis engaged theoretical claims by Martin Heidegger and Paul Riceour as well as advances in the psycholinguistic study of gesticulation to develop a philosophically-oriented theory of human gesture in cinematic narrative. Bassiri writes that he is interested in “the plasticity of representation and its relation to time, narrative, myth, and how these issues can be reconsidered in a more existential philosophical light.“ His mentor will be Samuel Collins, a current Townsend Center Dissertation Fellow from the Department of History.