Digital Revenants: Memory, Mourning, and Posthumous Persistence
My project examines final digital traces of individuals that continue to circulate posthumously when their deaths become publicly and politically resonant. It asks how these subsequent posts acquire new meanings through quoting, reposting, commenting, and archiving, and how they contribute to the discourses of digital mourning and contested public memory. Drawing on concepts of hauntology and spectrality, I conceptualize these persistent posts as Digital Revenants: traces that return across time and contexts, reshaping how dissent, legibility and accountability are articulated online.
Methodologically, I combine digital ethnography with discourse analysis, working with a small corpus of publicly accessible posts and interaction threads, sampled manually and studied for shifts in framing, affect, and engagement patterns over time.
The project aims to produce peer-reviewed scholarship, including conference presentations and a journal article, and it will offer an analytic framework for discussing posthumous digital visibility in politically sensitive online contexts
Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. Routledge.
Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. University of Minnesota Press.
Savin-Baden, M., & Mason-Robbie, V. (2020). Digital Afterlife: Death Matters in a Digital Age. Chapman & Hall.
Main Research Topics
- Collective Memory
- Contested Archive
- Hauntology and Spectrality
- (Digital) Afterlives of Trauma
- Politics of (in)visibility
- Embodied Research
Curriculum Vitae
- 2024 – ongoing: Guest Lecturer (part-time), Performance Theory and Analysis, SNDO / Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK), Netherlands
- 2025: Research Fellow at the Academy of Theater and Dance (ATD), Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK), Netherlands
- 2021 – ongoing: PhD Candidate, Interdisciplinary Humanities, University of California, Merced, United States
- 2021 – 2025: Teaching Assistant / Lecturer, University of California, Merced, United States
- 2020: MA, Theatre Studies, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (UvA Merit Scholarship)
Publications and Presentations
- Shirzadi, S. (2026, July 6–10). Spectral returns: How Ghostly Performativity Rewrites Histories and Re-imagines Futures. Paper accepted for presentation at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) Annual Conference, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
- Shirzadi, S. (May 2025). Unsettling the archive: Spectral memory and the haunted afterlife of Saartje Baartman. Paper presented at ASCA International Workshop: Re-imagining Universality in the Pluriverse, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
- Shirzadi, S. (June 2025). Metamorphosis and haunting: Nandipha Mntambo’s Europa as carnivalesque decolonial praxis. Paper presented at International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR): Performing Carnival, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.