Simin Behbahani: An Icon and Iconoclast

Date
Sat December 13th 2014, 4:00 - 6:00pm
Event Sponsor
Iranian Studies Program
Location
CEMEX Auditorium
First Annual Bita Prize in Persian Arts: Simin Behbahani

Event media

Speaker(s):
Omid Behbahani, Bahram Beyzaie, Farzaneh Milani, Marie Ostby, Kaveh Safa

 

Guest Speakers: Omid Behbahani, Bahram Beyzaie, Farzaneh Milani, Marie Ostby and Kaveh Safa

 

 

Bahram Beyzaie: "Poem reading in memory of Simin Behbahani"

Bahram Beyzaie is one of Iran's most acclaimed filmmakers, playwrights, and scholars of the history of Iranian theater, both secular and religious. He was a leader of the generation of filmmakers known as the Iranian New Wave, beginning in the late 1960s, and has since directed more than a dozen prize-winning films. He has also conducted pioneering research into the roots of ancient legends derived from Indo-Iranian mythology and known collectively as A Thousand and One Nights. Born in Tehran, Beyzaie was for many years the head of the Theatre Arts Department at Tehran University. Since his arrival at Stanford he has staged several of his plays and given workshops on Iranian mythology and cinema. He currently teaches courses on Iranian theatre and cinema.

Farzaneh Milani: “Mothers and Daughters in Simin Behbahani’s Work”

Farzaneh Milani is Raymond J. Nelson Professor and Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures and former Director of Studies in Women and Gender at the University of Virginia. She is the author most recently of "Words, not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement".  She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, Reader’s Digest, USA Today, and contributed to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. A past president of the Association of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies in America, Milani was nominated for Virginia Faculty of the Year in 1999. She was a Carnegie Scholar, 2006-2007.

Marie Ostby: "Simin Behbahani, Adrienne Rich and the Global Life of the Political Ghazal"

Marie Ostby is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. Her work has been published in Iranian Studies (2013) and the School of Oriental and African Studies Bulletin (2011). She is a member of the UVA Society of Fellows, and was one of two UVA participants in the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University in 2013. She received the 2012 Hammed Shahidian Critical Feminist Paper Award from the Iranian Women's Studies Foundation. 

Kaveh Safa: "Icons, Icepicks, Scales, and Simin Behbahani"

Kaveh Safa has studied Anthropology at Syracuse University, The New School for Social Research, and University of Chicago. Taught courses in the Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Memphis, Memphis College of Art, and Persian Language and Literature at the University of Virginia and Chicago as a visiting Melon Scholar.

He has worked on literary and cultural translation with Farzaneh Milani on Simin Behbahani's poetry in "A Cup of Sin.” He writes about gender, ideology, and worldview in Iranian cultural performances. He is well known for his work of women's folk theater, Baziha-ye Namayeshi), poetics and politics of identity (in Saedi's "Othello in The Land of Wonders"), symbolism and pragmatics of spirit possession cults in the Persian Gulf (Ahl-e Have, "People of the Air"); and various issues in comparative mythology, folklore, and popular culture. 

Event in English. Event is free and open to the public.