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Nov 09
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Rivanne Sandler

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With a University of Toronto General B.A, I was accepted into a three-year M.A. in the newly established (1961) Department of Islamic Studies (now Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations (NMC)). The expanded one-year M.A. included two years of make-up courses in the Islamic Studies undergraduate program. Language proficiency for graduate research was required for graduate study and in addition to the requisite Arabic, I chose Persian and Persian medieval history and culture taught by UK immigrants to the University of Toronto from the British tradition of study of the Middle East, Professors Michael Wickens (Trinity College, Cambridge) and Roger Savory (School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London). Persian was the source language for my thesis on “Religion and Politics Under the First Two Tughluqs, as viewed in the contemporary traditional sources, with special reference to Barani.” (Supervisors: Professor Aziz Ahmad and Professor G. Michael Wickens). Throughout my undergraduate and graduate studies, the focus of the Department of Islamic Studies was the study of medieval Arab, Persian and Turkish history, language, literature, and culture; its program was based on a concept of the medieval Middle East as an entity linked by a common Islamic heritage. I was a Teaching Fellow in the U of T Department of Islamic Studies, an Instructor, a Lecturer, an Assistant Professor and became an Associate Professor in 1978. As a junior appointment, I made the choice to focus my teaching on the modern Middle East and to introduce literature as a source of social history. This was facilitated by an escalating availability of English translations of modern Arabic and Turkish and Persian prose as well as poetry. Literature was a prominent feature of the course syllabi for all the courses I taught such as Middle Eastern Society: Traditional and Modern, Modern Middle Eastern Literatures: A Mirror of Society, Women’s Stories of the Middle East. The students in my courses were curious to learn about a part of the world they were not exposed to in Toronto public or high school curricula or in newspapers and magazines. The influx of Iranian students following the Iranian Revolution of 1979 provided a constituency for courses on Iran and literature in the original Persian. Readings in Modern Persian Literature (in the original Persian) catered to native speakers. The Iranian Short Story in Translation, Iranian Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century, Readings in Modern Persian Literature in Translation were available to the larger undergraduate student population. At the graduate level where Arabic, Turkish and Persian studies became distinct, I offered Literature and Society in 20th c. Iran (in the original Persian), and Persian Literature in the Diaspora. In retirement, I offer a course that I did not previously offer which focuses on the memoirs (originally in Persian and available in English) of Iranian Women: Iranian Women Reveal their Lives: The First Generation.

The theses I supervised reflect the broad academic training I received as a graduate student and were specifically focused on women’s poetry (“Gulten Akin, A Pioneering Turkish Woman Poet: An Analysis of Her Life, Poetry and Poetics Within Their Social, Historical and Literary Context” (defended 2001) and women in their social setting (“The New Armenian Woman’s Writing in the Ottoman Empire, 1880-1915” (defended 2000). I served as a co-supervisor for the thesis of the well-known poet Saeed Ghahremani whose granting department was the U of T Centre for Comparative Literature.

I consider as part of my education and research the three trips I made to Iran in the 1970s: three months travelling throughout Iran (except the south) in 1971, two months during 1974, living with a family in Tehran and attending a language school, and in 1976, a trip to the Royal Ontario Museum archeological site near Kermanshah. All three visits provided an opportunity to enlarge the range of society portrayed in literature.

Nov 10
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Dominic Parviz Brookshaw

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Dominic Parviz Brookshaw is Professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture at the University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow in Persian at Wadham College, Oxford. He has served on the editorial boards of both Iranian Studies and Middle Eastern Literatures and is a former member of both the Governing Council of the British Institute of Persian Studies and the Council of the Association for Iranian Studies. He has published widely on premodern Persian lyric poetry, women writers of the Qajar era, and twentieth-century Iranian poets. His most recent book, Hafiz and His Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance, and Patronage in Fourteenth-century Iran (I.B. Tauris, 2019), won the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award in 2020.

Nov 09
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Farzaneh Milani

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Farzaneh Milani completed her graduate studies in comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Forugh Farrokhzad: A Feminist Perspective,” is a critical study of the poetry of a pioneering Iranian poet. A past president of the Association of Middle Eastern Women Studies in America, Milani was the recipient of an All University Teaching Award in 1998 and nominated for Virginia Faculty of the Year in 1999. Milani has published over 100 articles, epilogues, forewords, and afterwords in Persian and English. She has served as the guest editor for two special issues of Nimeye-Digar, a Persian-language feminist journal (on Simin Daneshvar and Simin Behbahani); Iran Nameh (on Behbahani); and Iranian Studies (on Behbahani). She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, Readers Digest, USA Today, Daily Progress, and NPR’s All Things Considered. She has presented more than 250 lectures nationally and internationally. A former director of Studies in Women and Gender and chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, Milani is currently Raymond J. Nelson Professor of Persian Literature and Women Studies at the University of Virginia.

Nov 09
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Fatemeh Shams

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Fatemeh Shams is a professor of modern Persian literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also taught Persian language and literature at various academic institutions in the United Kingdom, including the University of Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her work focuses on the intersection of literature, politics, and society. Shams is interested in the evolution of poetry and patronage in the Persian literary tradition and the representation and transformation of this relationship in modern Iran. She has published articles and book chapters on poetry, patronage, and politics in the Iranian context. Her book, A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option under the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2020), deals with poets and patrons in Iran. She was awarded the Humboldt Foundation Fellowship to join the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin in order to embark on a book project on exile and exilic writing in the Persian tradition. Shams is also an internationally acclaimed, award-winning poet who has published three collections of poetry in Persian and in English. Her first collection, 88 (Gardoon, 2012), won the Jaleh Esfahani Poetry Award in London. Her third bilingual collection, When They Broke Down the Door (Mage, 2015), won a Latifeh Yarshater Book Award in 2016. Her poetry and translations have been featured in World Literature Today, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Life and Legends, Poetry Foundation, Jacket 2, Penn Sound, and more. The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women (Penguin, 2021) features a number of her poems.

Nov 08
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Michael Craig Hillmann

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In the mid-1970s, Michael co-founded The Academy of Language in Tehran, a language institute offering Persian language instruction at all levels to mostly British and American business, government, and university people. In 1977, back in the States, Michael founded Persepolis Institute (persepolisinstitute.org) which, based in Austin, Texas, continued the work of The Academy of Language. Over the years, MIchael and his Persepolis colleagues designed and implemented one-week, two-week, three-week, and five-week, intensive Persian seminars and immersions for government, business, and university experts in Persian over winter holidays, spring breaks, and during the summer months. Since 2005, Michael has turned his attention to the development of a Persian textbook series called Persian for America(ns)®, which consists of these four volumes: ‘Persian Listening’, ‘Persian Reading and Writing’ (2010), ‘Persian Grammar and Verbs’ (2012), and ‘Persian Conversation(s)’ (2014). He is also working with a team designing three Persian dictionaries and an ‘Advanced Persian Reader’.

Nov 09
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Ruhangiz Karachi

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Rouhangiz Karachi is an associate professor in the Department of Literature Institute for Humanities & Cultural Studies, Tehran. Her PhD thesis was titled “A Review of the Poetry of Modern Poetesses from the Period of Constitution in Iran.” She has published six books and more than forty articles, mainly about women and poets. Her first poems were published in 1970, and her first volume of poetry was published by Morgh Amin in 1998, entitled “With Woman Nightmares.” Her second collection of poetry, “The Earth’s Cross Eyed,” was published in 2001 by Neghah Sabz. Her poems have been published in various magazines and anthologies. She is also the author the following monographs: An Enquiry into the Poems of Thoughtful Poetesses during Constitutional Period (University of Al-Zahra, 1995); Forugh, the Sorrowful Rebel (Rahian Andisheh, 1997); and Descriptive Bibliography of Parvin Etesami (Ershad Press, 1997).

Nov 10
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Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

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Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab is Professor of Persian and Iranian Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He has published extensively on Persian literature, mysticism, and religion. His publications range from Persian poetry to Sufism, the role of religious and mystical motifs and metaphors in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and how peaceful religious injunctions are used to justify violence. At the moment he is the Principal Investigator (PI) on the ERC-Advanced Grant project titled Beyond Sharia: The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam, which examines Islamic nonconformist movements.

Jan 23
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Kamyar Abedi

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Kamyar Abedi, a freelance Iranian researcher and literary critic, holds a Bachelor’s degree in Persian Language and Literature and a Master’s degree in the History of Iran. His career, spanning two decades from 1990 to 2010, is marked by a diverse range of academic and research pursuits. Abedi has contributed significantly in various capacities: as an educator in esteemed high schools, an editor at Nādir Publication, and a deputy editor collaborating with Dr. Islāmī Nudūshan at Hastī Journal. His research endeavours at the Farhangistān-i Zabān va Adab-i Fārsī (Academy of Persian Language and Literature) are particularly noteworthy. 

Abedi has also made notable contributions within Iran, lecturing on Persian literature at the esteemed Dihkhudā Institution and internationally at Osaka University. Since the late 1980s, Abedi has devoted his research to contemporary Persian poetry, employing a historical lens. This dedicated focus has culminated in an impressive array of publications, including 40 books and approximately 300 scholarly articles in various journals and encyclopedias. 

Among his notable works, seven stand out, each marking a distinct period of his prolific career. These include “Az muṣāḥibat-i āftāb” (In the Companionship of the Sun) in 1996, a profound exploration of Sohrab Sepehri’s work; “Ba raġm-i panǧaraha-i basta” (Against the Closed Shutters) in 2001, delving into women’s poetry; “Shāʻirī az diyār-i Āz̲arʹābādigān” (A Poet from Azarabadegan) in 2009, a study on Raʻdī Āz̲arakhshī; “Jidāl bā Saʻdī dar ʻaṣr-i tajaddud” (Contesting Saadi in the Modern Era) in 2012; “Muqaddamahʹī bar shiʻr-i Fārsī dar sadah-ʼi bīstum-i Mīlādī” (Prelude to Persian Poetry in the Twentieth Century.) in 2015; “Ṣad sāl shiʻr-i zanān-i Īrān (1299-1399) : muntakhab-i shiʻr-i āzād, nīmāyī va sipīd” (100 Years of Iranian Women’s Poetry: A Selection of Free Verse & Prose Poem) in 2021; and “Marva Nabili: Shāʻir va sīnimāgar” (Marva Nabili: Poet and Cinematographer) in 2023. 

Nov 10
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Fatemeh Keshavarz

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Fatemeh Keshavarz is a professor of Persian literature and the director of the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland. She completed her studies at Shiraz University and at the University of London. She taught at Washington University in St. Louis for over twenty years, where she chaired the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from 2004 to 2011. In 2012, Keshavarz joined the University of Maryland as the Roshan Institute Chair in Persian Language and Literature, and director of the Roshan Institute Center for Persian Studies. Keshavarz is the author of several award-winning books, including Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi (University of South Carolina Press, 1998), Recite in the Name of the Red Rose (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), and a book of literary analysis and social commentary titled Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). She has also published other books and numerous journal articles. Keshavarz is a published poet in Persian and English and an activist for peace and justice. She was invited to speak at the United Nations General Assembly on the significance of cultural education. Her National Public Radio show, “The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi,” earned her the Peabody Award in 2008. In the same year, she received the Herschel Walker Peace and Justice Award.

Apr 16
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Hamid Rezaeiyazdi

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Hamid Rezaei Yazdi received his PhD from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Informed by postcolonial thought, his research challenges the binaristic paradigms that view non-Western modernity as the account of the conflict between the modern and the traditional and instead posits that Iranian modernities involved a dialogical synthesis of the novel and the traditional. Some of his publications include an article titled “The Dialogical Tradition of Iranian Modernity: Monāzereh, Simultaneity, and the Making of Modern Iran” (Iranian Studies, 2016); an edited volume (co-edited with Arshavez Mozaffari) titled Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception (Routledge, 2019); a monograph translated into Persian titled Mudirnītah-i Guft u Gū‘ī: Jamālzādah va Afsānah-i Pedar-i Dāstān Nivīsī (Tarh-i Naw, 2021), and a translation of Ahmad Kasravi’s Ā‘īn from Persian into English titled Ethos: A Critique of Eurocentric Modernity (I.B.Tauris, 2023). He teaches at the Department of Liberal Studies at Humber College and the University of Guelph-Humber.

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