Stanford Iranian Studies Program

April 8, 2022 Speakers: Mahnaz Afkhami, Ali Banuazizi, Mandana Zandian Scholars reflect on Ehsan Yarshater's remarkable contributions and lasting impact on the study of Iranian history, literature, culture, and the arts. Dr. Yarshater (1920-2018) was Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University, the founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Iranian Studies, and the found...

April 14, 2022 The Clash of Values  provides groundbreaking empirical data to demonstrate how the collision between Islamic fundamentalism and liberal nationalism explains the region’s present and will determine its future. Analyzing data from over 60,000 face-to-face interviews of nationally representative samples of people in seven countries—Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tun...

March 3, 2022 Speaker: Nicolas Gorjestani Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran's prime minister in the early 1950s, was one of the most consequential national leaders of the twentieth century. Based on his recent book, Nicolas Gorjestani will examine Mosaddegh's life story, resistance strategy, governance, reform record, and overthrow. Mosaddegh locked horns with Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Dwight Ei...

February 25, 2022 In the age of imperialism Iran was one of only a handful of non-Western states that maintained their sovereignty. However, as in other places such as the Ottoman Empire, China, and Siam, this sovereignty was punctured by unequal treaties that granted certain Western powers extraterritorial rights. These rights were justified by the absence of a rational legal system that would sa...

November 12, 2021 The film screening of Immigrant Stories: Iranian-Americans of Silicon Valley was followed by a conversation with the film's co-directors, Nima Naimi, Alireza Sanayei, and Julian Gigola.  About the documentary : Iranian Americans have achieved remarkable success across all professional fields, with many recognized internationally for their outstanding contributions. This...

October 15, 2021 Naghmeh Sohrabi and Arash Davari This talk reconstructs rumors and demonstrations in 1968 around the death of Gholamreza Takhti, Iran's beloved gold-winning wrestling champion, recentering them in the history of the 1979 revolution and the global 1960s. The account of the demonstrations provided here explains a mobilization tactic used to great effect in the lead up to the 1979 Ir...

November 5, 2021 Speaker: Sahand Abidi Sahand Abidi is an essayist and critic. He studied drama at the fine arts faculty of Tehran University. He worked as a playwright, dramaturge, assistant director and actor in theatre, and taught courses on the history of theater. He has worked in different capacities on numerous films, documentaries and plays. Many of his essays on aspects of modern Iranian t...

October 22, 2021 Speaker: Ameneh Yousefi Ameneh Yousefi was born in Hamedan city in Iran. She received her Doctoral in Persian Literature from the University of Karaj. She has done several auditorial, visual and animated projects as an author for Local National Broadcasting. She currently teaches Persian Literature in Ganjname University in Hamedan City and is researching the representation of int...

September 29, 2021 Narges Mohammadi in conversation with Darius Rejali and Abbas Milani. Narges Mohammadi is Deputy Director of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre (DHRC). She was elected as President of the Executive Committee of the National Council of Peace in Iran, a broad coalition against war and for the promotion of human rights. She has campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty in...

August 11, 2021 Speaker: Fereshteh Sadreorafaei Fereshteh Sadreorafaei was born in Tehran, Iran in 1962. From a young age, she attended the Children and Adolescents' Intellectual Development Center. There, she studied theater and puppetry and staged several puppet shows. From 1974-1976, she was a student at Pars National Ballet under the supervision of Abdullah Nazemi. Due to the Iranian Revolutio...

July 18, 2021 Kai Bird discusses President Jimmy Carter's interaction with Iran as a part of his new book, "The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter" (Crown, 2021). More about the book: "Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the W...

June 24, 2021 Professor Farzaneh Milani discusses Iranian women writers and the Iranian women’s movement with Professor Abbas Milani. The conversation is a part of the on-going series on the Iranian women’s movement. Farzaneh Milani is Raymond J. Nelson Professor of Iranian and Gender Studies and Cavaliers’ Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Virginia. She is the former Chair of...

May 27, 2021 Literary research premised on sensory studies challenges above all the monopolization of modern Persian literary criticism by socio-political discourses, which generally rely on content-based approaches constructing "committed readings" of literary production. "Committed readings" circumscribe the significance of the literary by allowing the text to only be a site of resistance and ca...

May 20, 2021 This study estimates the joint effect of a new political regime and war against Iraq, on Iran’s per capita Gross Domestic Product (‘GDP,’ constant 2010 US$) for the period 1978–1988, during the revolution/war. Professor Mohammad Reza Farzanegan uses a synthetic control approach, whereby a synthetic Iran is constructed as a weighted average of other Middle East and North Africa (‘MENA’...

May 6, 2021 Kian Katouzian discusses her life as a working woman in Iran, participating in the opposition against the Shah and then against Khomeini before leaving Iran for a life of exile in France. She discusses the feelings of loneliness and disorientation while living in exile. She earned a master’s degree in education in Iran in the 1960s, was a professor of history and geography for more tha...

April 22, 2021 Translating a work that employs inventive literary techniques is an already arduous task, however, negotiating with a system of imposed censorship makes the process of translating and publishing increasingly more intricate. In this talk, Akram Pedramnia explores the challenges of translating modernist works, like "Lolita," "Tender is the Night," as well as "Ulysses," under a system...

For the past several decades, scholars have studied and written about the Iranian constitutional revolution with the 1979 Islamic Revolution as a subtext, obscuring the secularist trend that characterized its very nature. Constitutionalist leaders represented a diverse composite of beliefs, yet they all shared a similar vision of a new Iran, one that included far-reaching modernizing reforms and c...

When Britain and the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Iran in August 1941 during the Second World War, in violation of Iran’s policy of neutrality, their principal purpose was to use Iran as a bridge to supply a Russia hard-pressed by Hitler’s army with vital military and other supplies. Believing Reza Shah would not cooperate with the Allies to the degree they required, Britain and Russia engine...

Mohammad Mosaed is an Iranian investigative journalist who wrote and reported on economic corruption in Iran. He was arrested in November 2019, banned from working, and sentenced to 4 years and 9 months in prison. He escaped the country while appealing the final verdict and is currently in Turkey. Mohammad received the 2018 Best Economic Reporter Award, the 2020 CPJ Press Freedom Award, and the 20...

Farzaneh Omidvarnia’s 2019 short film “Song Sparrow” (11 minutes) follows a group of refugees trying to reach a safe country in search of a better life. Based on real events in Austria in 2015 and Ireland in 2019, the film creatively uses dolls and no dialogue to tell the story of refugees who pay a smuggler to transport them in a refrigerated truck—the freezing temperatures turning their hopes fo...

Professor Domenico Ingenito discusses his new book Beholding Beauty: Sa'di of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry (Brill, December 2020). The book explores the relationship between sexuality, politics, and spirituality in the lyrics of Sa'di Shirazi (d. 1282 CE), one of the most revered masters of classical Persian literature. Relying on a variety of sources, including u...

Dr. John Ghazvinian discusses his recent book America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present (Knopf, 2021). In recent times, the United States and Iran have seemed closer to war than peace, but that is not where their story began. When America was in its infancy, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams turned to the history of the Persian Empire as they looked for guidance on how to run their new...

Amir Ahmadi Arian discusses his first novel in English, Then the Fish Swallowed Him published by HarperCollins in 2020. “Yunus Turabi, a bus driver in Tehran, leads an unremarkable life. A solitary man since the unexpected deaths of his father and mother years ago, he is decidedly apolitical—even during the driver’s strike and its bloody end. But everyone has their breaking point, and Yunus has re...

Set in Tehran and New York, Man of My Time is the story of Hamid Mozaffarian, who is as alienated from himself as he is from the world. After decades of working with ambivalence for the Iranian government, Hamid travels on a diplomatic mission to New York, where he encounters his estranged family and retrieves the ashes of his father. Tucked into a mint tin in Hamid’s pocket, the ashes propel him...

Filmmaker Ala Mohseni will discuss his new documentary "Ayyar e Tanha." It documents the particular situation in Iran that forced an acclaimed and distinguished artist like Bahram Beyzaie to leave his homeland and live in exile. Please watch the film at your convenience and join for the live discussion: https://www.radiofarda.com/a/30905487.html Please note: the film and the conversation are in Pe...