Stanford Iranian Studies Program

Majid Naficy, the Arthur Rimbaud of Persian poetry, published his first poems in Jon-e Isfahan at age thirteen. Since then, he has put out more than 20 books of poems and essays in Persian. He fled Iran in 1983, a year and a half after the execution of his wife, Ezzat in Tehran. He lives in Los Angeles with his son, Azad, where the city of Venice has engraved a fragment of his poetry on a wall in...

Born and raised in Teheran, Iran, Farzaneh Milani attended French primary and secondary schools. She earned her BA in French Literature in 1970 from California State University at Hayward. Transferring to the University of California in Los Angeles, she completed her graduate studies in Comparative Literature in 1979. Her dissertation, Forugh Farrokhzad: A Feminist Perspective, was a critical stud...

"Ahmad Fardid: A "Westtoxicated" Persian?" by Ali Mirsepassi by Stanford Iranian Studies Program

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iranian politics has conventionally been viewed as a polarized conflict between “secular” and “Islamic” ideologies. I argue that this view has masked the real battle, which has been between despotism and patriarchy, on the one hand, and democracy and feminism, on the other. The century-old struggle for democracy in Iran has been enmeshed in the dynamics of changi...

Farzin Vejdani is an Assistant Professor of modern Iranian history at the University of Arizona. He received his PhD in history from Yale University (2009). His research interests broadly cover late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Iranian intellectual and cultural history, including Ottoman-Iranian cultural relations, Persian language policy, and Iranian nationalist historiography. He is cu...

Born and educated in Iran, Mohsen Yalfani is one of the most respected playwrights of Iran. He first established his reputation in the years before the revolution when his plays where known for their unflinching approach to social problems of the time. He spent several years in prison during the Shah's regime and in the early months and years of the 1979 revolution, he was one of the leaders of Ir...

Oliver Bast, Dr. phil., Maître-ès-Lettres, is Senior Lecturer [Associate Professor] in Middle Eastern History and Persian at the University of Manchester where he served as head of the department of Middle Eastern Studies between 2008 and 2011. He read History and Persian Studies in Berlin (Humboldt-Universität), in Tehran (University of Tehran), in Paris (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle – Pari...

Amir Soltani is a graphic novelist, documentary filmmaker and human rights activist. He is the co-creator of "Zahra's Paradise", a NYT bestselling graphic novel published as an interactive real-time webcomic (please see http://www.zahrasparadise.com/). "Zahra's Paradise" is fiction based on the true story of an Iranian woman, whose son vanishes after the 2009 protests against Iran's fraudulent ele...

Christopher de Bellaigue was born in London in 1971 and was raised in the United Kingdom. In 1995 he graduated in Indian and Persian Studies from Cambridge University and started working as a journalist in India. Since then, he has written from the Middle East, Turkey and South Asia for, among others, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, the New Yorker, the London Revi...

Sholeh Quinn is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Merced. She received her PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 1993. Her main area of research focuses on the history of Iran during the Safavid era (ca. 16th-early 18th centuries), with a special emphasis on historiography.

Niloofar Beyzaie is the daughter of the theater and film director Bahram Beyzaie and Monir Azam Raminfar. Leaving Iran in 1985 for political reasons, she studied German literature, theater, film and television studies, and education at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. In 1994 she founded the theater group "Daritsche", serving as director, playwright, and lighting and cos...

Jasmin Darznik, Washington University & Lee University Jasmin Darznik is the author of The Good Daughter: A Memoir of MyMother’s Life. A New York Times bestseller, the book has beentranslated into eight languages and was shortlisted for the 2012Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her writing has appeared inthe New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Dr. Darznik was born in Teh...

Touraj Daryaee is the Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the Historyof Iran and the Persianate World and the Associate Director of the SamuelJordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine. His recent book is the Oxford History of Iran, Oxford. His last work was abook co-athored with Iraj Afshar called: Scholars and Humanists: The Letters of S.H. Taqizadeh and...

Sahar Delijani was born in Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran in 1983, the same year both her parents were arrested due to their political activism against the Islamic regime. In 1996, when she was 12 years old, her parents decided to move to Northern California to join her mother’s family. Delijani was registered in a middle school, starting from 7th grade. Her works have appeared in a wide range of lit...

Zakeri finished his Ph. D. studies in Near Eastern History at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City in 1987. The title of his Dissertation was Sasanian Soldiers in Early Muslim Society: the Origins of the 'Ayyaran and Futuwwa (an expanded revised version of this was published, Wiesbaden 1995). He taught medieval and Islamic history courses at the University of Utah (1984-1987). Working as a Resea...

MARY HEGLAND Mary Elaine Hegland is professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University. Her areas of focus include women and gender, political anthropology, Shia Islamic ritual and politics, resistance and revolution, social and cultural change, and the anthropology of personal philosophies and life histories. Hegland has conducted anthropological fieldwork in Iran, Pakistan, India, Turkey, Afgha...

The Psychology of Dictatorship Fathali Moghaddam is Professor, Department of Psychology, and Director of The Conflict Resolution Program, Department of Government, Georgetown University. He is the Editor of ‘Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology’ (American Psychological Association). He was educated from an early age in England, and worked for the United Nations and McGill University bef...

For the past seven years, we have been giving an annual award, named the Bita Prize for Persian Letters. The winners have been some of the most prominent Iranian writers, poets, vocalists, and playwrights of our time—from Simin Behbahani and Mohammad Reza Shajarian (the first the poet laureate of the people and the second the country's most beloved vocalist), to Bahram Beyzaie (the eminent film-ma...

DENA TAHERIANFAR For the past seven years, we have been giving an annual award, named the Bita Prize for Persian Letters. The winners have been some of the most prominent Iranian writers, poets, vocalists, and playwrights of our time—from Simin Behbahani and Mohammad Reza Shajarian (the first the poet laureate of the people and the second the country's most beloved vocalist), to Bahram Beyzaie (th...

Houchang Esfandiar Chehabi is a Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University. He has also taught at Harvard University, UCLA, and the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of Iranian Politics and Religions Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini (1990); principal author of Distant Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the last 500 years (2006)...

Charles Melville is Professor of Persian History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He has a BA (Hons.) in Arabic and Persian from Cambridge (1972), an MA in Islamic History (SOAS, 1973) and a PhD on the Historical seismicity of Iran (Cambridge, 1978). His main research interests are in the history and historiography of Iran in the Mongol to Safavid periods (14th-17th...

Dick Davis is Professor Emeritus of Persian at Ohio State University, where he was chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from 2002 to 2012. He has written scholarly works on both English and Persian literature, as well as eight volumes of his own poetry. He has been the recipient of numerous academic and literary awards, including the Ingram Merrill and Heinemann awards fo...

A brief historical overview of theatrical performances in prison, particularly in Iran. The presentation is based on an essay. You can contact the Iranian Studies Program for a copy of the essay after the event has occurred. Nasser Rahmaninejad, a foremost, celebrated Iranian artist started his career in theatre in 1959 Iran. In response to the authoritarian cultural policies and harsh censorship...

Massoud Behnoud, a prominent Iranian journalist and writer, was born on 27 July 1947 in Tehran. He started his work as a journalist in 1964. During his long career he worked as an investigating journalist for different publications and founded more than 20 newspapers and magazines, none of which are currently in publication. Between 1971-79 he was the chief editor of the most influential and popul...

Reza Zarghamee brings multiple perspectives and deep knowledge to his account of the life of Cyrus the Great. Born in London in 1978 to Iranian parents, Zarghamee grew up in Boston. His immersion in the ancient history of Iran started early: At the age of thirteen, he began studying Old Persian cuneiform at the urging of Professor Richard Frye, a founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at...