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Developments in Classical Persian Music over the Last Fifty Years
Mar 27 2012 - 18:30
For two generations of Iranians, their most personal moments of the sublime, and their most public expressions of social exuberance, their joys of love and their pains of separation have been inseparable from the tender and thunderous voice and music of Mohammad-Reza Shajarian. Whether reciting lines from a prayer or singing one of Khayam’s Quatrains, reviving an old song or putting to music one of the masterpieces of modern Persian poetry, his vast musical erudition, his unfailing aesthetic taste and his perfectionism combine to make it yet another part of his impressive collection of work. ...
Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women and the Freedom Movement
Mar 12 2012 - 18:30
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 study of the poetry of a pioneering Iranian woman poet. Milani taught Persian Language and Literature at UCLA for four years before coming to the University of Virginia in 1986. Past president of the ...
Persian Poetry in Los Angeles: Nostalgia vs. Cultural Adaptation
Feb 21 2012 - 18:30
Majid Naficy, Poet & Co-editor of Daftarhaye Kanoon
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 Venice beach. Majid has published two collections of poetry, "Muddy Shoes" (Beyond Baroque Books 1999) and "Father and Son" (Red Hen Press, ...
The Veil: Its History and Iconography in Ancient Iran and Islam
Nov 9 2011 - 18:30
Guest: Bijan Gheiby
(University of Hamburg)
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 Conferences. His most recent publication is “Achievement of our Ancestors and Opinion of the Contemporaries” that deals with the literary monuments of ancient Iran ...
Revisiting Ghosts of the Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran
Oct 17 2011 - 18:30
Lecture on: Revisiting Ghosts of Revolution: A 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 received her undergraduate degree in social-cultural anthropology from University of California Berkeley and her masters and PhD, also in social cultural anthropology, from Columbia ...
The Poetics of Passage: Bridging the Gap or Filling in the Precipice?
Jan 13 2011 - 18:30
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 University in Bloomington, Indiana, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the University of Toronto and York University. He has also been Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, Britain, ...
Literary Trends in Contemporary Iran
Oct 8 2010 - 18:30
Guest: Ali Dehbashi
(Editor of Bukhara Magazine: A Persian Review of Culture, Art and Iranology)
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. As the curator of Nights of Bukhara, a highly acclaimed lecture series in Tehran, Dehbashi has hosted ...
Theocracy's Limits: Iran at the Precipice of its Contradictions
Mar 9 2010 - 18:00
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 Times. Mr. Cohen has written "Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo" (Random House, 1998), an account of the wars of Yugoslavia's destruction, and "Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the ...
Persian in Pakistan: Many Dimensions of a Cultural Relationship
Feb 23 2010 - 18:00
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 Nurbakhshiya Between Medieval and Modern Islam, and Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis. He has recently finished a book project entitled Bodies of God's Friends: Sufis in Persianate Islamic Societies, and ...
