Azita H. Taleghani is an Associate Professor in Persian language, literature, and linguistics at the University of Toronto. Her research has primarily focused on second-language learners and heritage speakers’ pedagogy, linguistic approaches in modern Persian literature, especially stylistic aspects in the poems of Persian women poets, Persian syntax, and morphology, as well as web-based and online language teaching. She is the associate editor and a member of the editorial board of Women Poets Iranica. She has published a monograph titled Modality, Aspect and Negation in Persian. She is currently working on a monograph, “Grammar of Persian Simple Verbs for Persian Second-Language Learners” and co-editing the volume, “Persian Second Language Pedagogy: New Trends and Innovations.” The two other projects that she has recently started to concentrate on take up language and style in the poems of contemporary Iranian women poets, as well as social deconstruction in the poems of ancient and medieval Iranian women poets. She has published several refereed articles, most recently, “Archaism as an Aesthetic Technique and Linguistics Process,” “Negative Forms of Persian Progressive Tense: Evidence from Monolingual, Second Language Learners and Heritage Speakers,” “Foregrounding and Its Role in Persian Modern Poetry,” “Persian Progressive Tense: Serial Verb Construction or Aspectual Complex Predicate,” and “Persian Linguistics in the 20th Century.”
The University of Toronto, in collaboration with the Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation (EIF), is launching Women Poets Iranica, an integrative encyclopedia of postclassical, modern, and contemporary women poets. Informed by several decades of transdisciplinary recuperative research in Persian literary studies, Poets Iranica provides literary- historical articles on female poets and their poetic agency, imagination, tropes, narratives, and lives and the provenance and literary significance of their poetry. As a digital encyclopedia, Poets Iranica is an academic reconceptualization of women poets’ biographical dictionaries (tazkirah), which began with the mid-sixteenth century Javahir al-‘Ajayib (Jewels of Wonder) of Fakhri Haravi. Written by experts in Persian literary history and its cognate fields, and intended for the diverse needs of students, teachers, researchers, and the educated public, the well-documented articles in Women Poets Iranica will be prepared following the highest standards of historical accuracy, reliability and citation in the humanities and social sciences.