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Nov 09
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Azita H. Taleghani

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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.”

Nov 09
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Sunil Sharma

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Sunil Sharma is Professor of Persianate & Comparative Literature at Boston University. His areas of research are premodern Persian and South Asian literatures, specifically poetry and court cultures, history of the book, and travel writing. His last book, Mughal Arcadia: Persian Poetry in an Indian Court (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a study of early modern Persianate literature. The output of a multi-year project entitled “Veiled Voyagers: Muslim Women Travelers from Asia and the Middle East” with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Daniel Majchrowicz was recently published as Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Indiana University Press, 2022). The book recovers, translates, and analyzes Muslim women’s travel writing from a range of languages in order to draw out the gendered relationships that inhere between travel and Muslim identities, nationalism, and the shaping of global power. Sharma was the president of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS).

Nov 23
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Ashk Dahlén

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Ashk Dahlén is a docent in Iranian Languages at Uppsala University and translator of Persian literature into Swedish. His areas of research are Persian lyric and epic poetry and mirrors for princes, Iranian philosophy and intellectual history, Zoroastrianism, and antinomian Sufism.  

Dahlén received his doctorate in Iranian Languages from Uppsala University and has held post-doctoral fellowships at Stockholm University and University of Tehran. His doctoral research was published as Islamic law, epistemology and modernity. Legal philosophy in contemporary Iran (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2003). In 2004, he was recognized with the Beskow Award by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities for the best dissertation in humanities.  

Dahlén is a member of the Advisory Board of the Encyclopædia Iranica and the Collegium of the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. He was the founding president of the Scandinavian Society for Iranian Studies (SSIS). He has published widely within Iranian Studies. His most recent book, Zarathustra sånger: den äldsta iranska diktningen (H:ström – Text och kultur, 2023), is a study and translation of Zarathustra’s Gatha from Old Avestan. 

 

Nov 09
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Leila Rahimi Bahmany

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Leila Rahimi Bahmany is a Historical Studies Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She completed her doctorate at the Free University of Berlin. Her first book is titled Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation: Forugh Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath (Leiden University Press, 2015), and it was the recipient of a 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award. The book juxtaposes the highly ambivalent essence of the mirror metaphor in the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad with that imagery in the oeuvre of Sylvia Plath. The interpretive prowess of the study reinforces the inseparable dynamics of the culturally established configurations of a woman’s self-image and her voice. Her main fields of interest are women’s literature and feminist literary theory and criticism. She has authored several book chapters and encyclopedia articles on Persian literature and Sufism, as well as on Azerbaijani intellectuals. Currently, she is working on her second monograph, dealing with the life and literary works of a modern Iranian female writer, Simin Daneshvar. The monograph aims to present a thorough study of Daneshvar’s biography and her fictional narratives. She also studies modern prose narratives from Iran written in Azeri Turkish.

Photo credit: Andrea Kane, Institute for Advanced Study

Nov 09
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Pegah Shahbaz

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Pegah Shahbaz is a specialist of the classical Persian literature of Iran, Central and South Asia. She works on questions of narratology, translation, and systems of knowledge transmission in the Persianate world, and the reception and domestication of Indian literary, religious, and cultural heritage in Persian literature and culture from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries.

She is currently a Research Associate at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, an Associate Member of the Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur l’Inde, l’Asie du Sud et sa Diaspora (CERIAS) at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and the section editor of the Fables and Tales chapter of the Perso-Indica project. She also works as a lecturer at the Institute of Iranian Studies, Georg-August University of Göttingen, Germany, where she teaches literature and history courses at the Master’s level.

Pegah Shahbaz conducts scientific collaboration through a wide network of scholars of Persian and Islamic studies and collaborates as member and scientific partner with a number of groundbreaking research projects, such as the “Kalīla wa Dimna AnonymClassic” project funded by the European Research Council at Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany, and the aforementioned Perso-Indica project in Paris, France.

Pegah Shahbaz’s ongoing research project is focused on the study of fourteenth-century historiographies and hagiographies of the Buddha in the Persian language.

 

Recent Publications

“The Persian Bilawhar wa Buyūdhas(a)f(a) As a Mirror for Princes,” in Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Lancaster University (accepted, forthcoming).

“From Simile to Symbol: A Study of Comparison Devices in Persian Literature,” in “The Handbook of Persian Literary Devices”, ed. Alireza Korangy (Springer, accepted).

“Mirroring the ‘Orient’ in Words: Persian Prose Fiction in Translation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation, eds. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, Michelle Quay, and Patricia Higgins (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022), 229-46.

“Kalīla wa Dimna–yi Manẓūm,” in Perso-Indica. An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions, eds. F. Speziale and C. W. Ernst, available at www.perso-indica.net/section/fables_and_tales, 2022.

“Women in the Realm of ‘True Men’: A Study of Gender in Persian Devotional Literature of South Asia,” peer-reviewed research paper in Literature, Social Movements and Gender Issues in South Asia. FINDAS (The Centre for South Asian Studies)—Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (March 2021), 2-21.

“Indo-Persian Narrative Literature: Cultural Translation and Rewriting of Indian Tales in Persianate South Asia,” Asiatische Studien-Etudes Asiatiques, revue de la Société Suisse-Asie 74, 2 (January 2021): 387-412. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/asia-2020-0030.

“Čandāyan,” in Perso-Indica. An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions, eds. F. Speziale and C. W. Ernst, available at www.perso-indica.net/work/candayan, 2020.

“Persian Monshi, Persian Jones: English Translations of Sa‘dī’s Golestān from the Late Eighteenth to the Mid Nineteenth Centuries” Iranian Studies, Special Issue: Sa‘dī at Large 52, 5-6 (November 2019): 739-760. DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2019.1656056.

“Laughing at Adultery in Persian Literature and Culture,” in Studies in the Iranian World II. Medieval and Modern, Anna Krasnowolska and Renata Rusek-Kowalska, eds. (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2015); online: Oxford University Press, 2018, 99-106.

 

Aug 04
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Yaser Farashahinejad

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Yaser Farashahinejad is a research officer with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto. He also served as The Northrop Frye Center Visiting Research Fellow, Victoria College, at the University of Toronto. Yaser holds a PhD in Persian literature and language and completed his postdoctoral research at Tarbiat Modares University in 2022. In addition to his academic pursuits, he is also a fiction writer, poet, and translator. To date, Yaser has authored four books: Gūrʹhā-yi kāghaz̲ī (Paper Graves), published by Diyār Nāmag in 2022; Farār az furm (Escaping Form), with Tarh-e-no Publications, Tehran, in 2020; Minārahʹhā-yi vārūnah (Inverted Minarets), also published in 2020 by Tarh-e-no; and Nazarīyahʹhā-yi rumān dar Īrān (Theories of the Novel in Iran), which was brought out by Pāyā Publications in 2019. As a translator, Yaser has thus far rendered two books from English to Persian: Hamid Rezaei Yazd’s Persian Literature and Modernity (as Mudarnītah-yi guftugūʼī, published in 2021 by Tarh-e-no) and The Rumi Prescription by Melody Moezzi (also published by Tarh-e-no in 2021, under the title Darmāngarī-yi Mawlānā). He has recently finished translating Ali Mirsepassi’s Transnationalism in Iranian Philosophical Thought, the manuscript of which is currently in press. Yaser has published numerous articles in Iran and internationally, focusing on contemporary Persian literature and history. His work has appeared in various publications, including Iran Namag, where he has published two articles. A third piece, titled “Subliminal Dialogue,” is forthcoming in the same journal. Since 2020, Yaser has also worked as an editor and book reviewer at Tarh-e-no, a highly reputable and prestigious publisher in Iran. His research interests revolve around modernity, dialogue, and the philosophy of literature.

Nov 09
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Sholeh Wolpé

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Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-American poet, playwright, and librettist. She is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, a Midwest Book Award, and the Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize. Her publications number over twelve collections of poetry, translations, and anthologies, as well as several plays. Her most recent book, Abacus of Loss: A Memoir in Verse, was chosen by The Mary Sue magazine as one of “8+ Beautiful, Contemporary Novels Written in Verse That Make Poetry Accessible,” and was hailed by Colorado Review as a book that “examines the masks of patriarchy in powerful metaphor and narrative.”

Wolpé’s translations of the twelfth-century Sufi mystic poet, Attar, The Conference of the Birds (W.W. Norton & Company), and of the twentieth-century Iranian rebel poet Forugh Farrokhzad, Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (University of Arkansas Press), have garnered awards and established Wolpé as a celebrated re-creator of Persian poetry in English.

Most recently, her play SHAME was featured in New Iranian Plays, published by Aurora Metro books (2022). Wolpé wrote the libretto for an oratorio, “The Conference of the Birds,” and a multi-genre performance, “The Seven Valleys,” which premiered, respectively, at the Broad Stage and the Getty Villa Museum in 2022. “Song of Exile,” for The Arlington Chorale, will premiere in Virginia in 2023.

Sholeh has lived in Iran, Trinidad, and the United Kingdom and is currently a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. She performs her literary work solo and with musicians internationally. She divides her time between Los Angeles and Barcelona.

Nov 28
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Aqsa Ijaz

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Aqsa Ijaz specialises in classical Persian poetry and studies its reception in mediaeval and early modern North India. Born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, Aqsa is trained in Indian classical music, with expertise in the vocal forms of thumri and ghazal. As a scholar of Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi, Aqsa’s doctoral research focuses on the reception of the twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi and examines the formative role of Nizami’s poetry in shaping the language of romantic love in premodern North India. Besides her scholarly work, Aqsa is an essayist and a translator and writes for various international publications such as World Literature Today, The Herald, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Aqsa is committed to sharing academic research in the field of South Asian Humanities with audiences across the globe for which she serves on the editorial board of the Marginalia Review of Books in Los Angeles. Currently, she teaches Urdu at the Department of Language Studies and is co-manager of The Global Past Research Initiative at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

May 16
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Sara Molaie

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Sara is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto.
Her research focuses on the history of modern Iran and specifically targets the intersection of gender modernization and literary modernity through modern Persian and modern Hebrew literature. Using archival materials and feminist methodologies, she assesses the relationship between gender, literature and the public culture in the modern Middle East.
Mar 27
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Yasaman Arang

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Yasaman Arang is a researcher and scholar specializing in women’s poetry and Persian literary traditions. She holds a Ph.D. in Persian Language and Literature and has dedicated over two decades to the study of women’s poetry, its evolution, and its sociocultural impact. Arang has authored several books, including The Divan of Zhaleh Qaem-Maqami (2010), The Silent Awakening: A Critique of Zhaleh Qaem-Maqami’s Poetry (2014), and From Spring to Sea: The Evolution of Women’s Poetry from Rabia to Zhaleh (2025). Her research extends to numerous scholarly articles, covering topics such as imagery, satire, and feminist aesthetics in Persian poetry. In addition to her academic contributions, Arang explores gender and language studies, addressing issues of linguistic bias and gendered discourse. She has taught Persian language and literature at Azad University in Tehran and Isfahan. 

Beyond academia, she is also an accomplished poet, with two published collections: Parvanigi (Butterfly Essence) (2014) and From Eternal Migrations (2016). A committed advocate for women’s rights, she has written extensively on social and legal issues affecting women. Her research interests include women’s and gender studies, women’s poetry, literary criticism, and mystical literature. 

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