Stanford Iranian Studies Program

Nima Mina is a member of academic staff at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies in the field of Persian and Comparative Literature. He received his academic training in general linguistics and Medieval Studies at the University of Marburg, Germany and in Comparative Literature and Music at the Universite de Montreal in Quebec. Recently, he has authored and edited books...

Dariush Mehrjui, born 8 December 1939 in Tehran) is an Iranian director, screenwriter, producer, and film editor. As an Iranian New Wave cinema icon, Mehrjui is regarded to be one of the intellectual directors of Iranian cinema. Most of his films are inspired by literature and adopted based on Iranian and foreign novels and plays. A screening of his latest film, Santuri, followed by a conversation...

"The Islamic Revolution of 1979: A Diplomat's View" by Jack Miklos by Stanford Iranian Studies Program

Born and raised in Tehran, Shahrnush Parsipur received her B.A. in sociology from Tehran University in 1973 and studied Chinese language and civilization at the Sorbonne from 1976 to 1980. Her first book was Tupak-e Qermez (The Little Red Ball - 1969), a story for young people. Her first short stories were published in the late 1960s. One early story appeared in Jong-e Isfahan, no. 9 (June 1972),...

One of the rising stars of Iranian poetry, Ziba Karbassi was born in 1974 in Tabriz, Iran. She left Iran in 1989 and now lives between London and Paris. She has published five volumes of poetry in Persian, all outside Iran, and continues to write prolifically. Her poetry tackles difficult themes with a mastery of craft and has received wide critical attention. Her work has been translated into sev...

Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming acting Foreign Editor on September 11, 2001, and Foreign Editor six months later. Since 2004 he has written a column for the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, first for the news pages and then, since 2007, for the Op-Ed page. In 2009 he was named a columnist of The New York...

Farhad Daftary has been affiliated since 1988 to The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, where he is currently Co-Director and Head of the Department of Academic Research and Publications. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in the US from 1958-71, receiving his doctorate in 1971 from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a consulting-editor of Encyclopaedia Iranica, co...

"The Odyssey of a Writer From Shiraz to Stanford" by Shahriyar Mandanipour by Stanford Iranian Studies Program

Nazila Fathi, New York Times reporter who was in Iran at the time of the June 2009 election.

Paul Rivlin is an economist and senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He studied at Cambridge, London and Harvard Universities and is the author of four books: The Dynamics of Economic Policy Making in Egypt; The Israeli Economy; Economic Policy and Performance in the Arab World, and Arab Economies in the Twenty First Century a...

Shahzad Bashir, Director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Stanford University Shahzad Bashir specializes in Islamic Studies with primary interests in Sufism, Shi'ism, and the intellectual and social history of Persianate Islamic societies (Iran and Central and Southern Asia). He is the author of Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nurbakh...

Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming acting Foreign Editor on September 11, 2001, and Foreign Editor six months later. Since 2004 he has written a column for the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, first for the news pages and then, since 2007, for the Op-Ed page. In 2009 he was named a columnist of The New York...

"Iran and Iraq: Cultural Ties or Political Rifts?" by Houchang Chehabi by Stanford Iranian Studies Program

Ali Dehbashi has been the editor-in-chief of Bukhara since 1999, a periodical focusing on Iranian and world cultures and literatures. He has authored several books and edited over seventy volumes on Iranian history and literature. He has allocated special issues of Bukhara to world thinkers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Gunter Grass, Osip Mandelstam, Umberto Eco, Hannah Arendt, and Virginia Woolf....

Reza Baraheni, the author of more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, literary theory and criticism, currently teaches at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Winner of the prestigious Scholars-at-Risk-Program Award of the University of Toronto and Massey College, Baraheni has taught in the University of Tehran, Iran, University of Texas in Austin, Indiana Universit...

Revisiting Ghosts of Revolution: Reading and a Reflection on Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran Shahla Talebi is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University. A native of Iran, she lived through the 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War and left Iran in 1994 to the United States where she now resides. She rece...

Bijan Gheiby was born in 1954 in Tehran. He studied Filmmaking and Radio and Television Broadcasting in Tehran and Long Beach (Ca.) In Germany he studied Iranistik in the universities of Hamburg and Göttingen, where he received his Ph. D. in Iranian Studies and Communications. He has taught Zoroastrianism in the University of Hamburg and has been a participant in different international Conference...

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...