Audio

Developments in Classical Persian Music over the Last Fifty Years

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. ...

Persian Poetry in Los Angeles: Nostalgia vs. Cultural Adaptation

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, ...

Revisiting Ghosts of the Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran

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 ...

Literary Trends in Contemporary Iran

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 ...