A Persian Paradise: Vita and Harold in Iran 1925-1927 with Nicci Obholzer Reflections on Sissinghurst’s exhibition “A Persian Paradise: Vita and Harold in Iran 1925-1927”, held between October 2023 and May 2024. Thanks to Royal Oak Foundation funding,...
Making and Remaking Empire in Early Qajar Iran with Assef Ashraf In 1722, the Safavid empire collapsed. An empire that ruled for over two centuries, and which in its heyday spanned parts of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and present-day Iran, came to a swift end....
The New Persian Romance in a Global Middle Ages with Cameron Cross In the early tenth century CE, a remarkable literary event took place, in which well-known stories of lovers were recast by court-affiliated poets as independent versified works in the emergent...
Historiographical Controversies Involving the Rise of the Achaemenid Empire with Reza Zarghamee The political background to the rise of the Achaemenid Empire remains elusive and the subject of important shifts in scholarly consensus over the past four decades....
Fifty Shades of Collecting: Jean Pozzi and his Islamic Collection with Negar Habibi This talk aims to document the life and art collecting career of Jean Pozzi (1885-1967), a French plenipotentiary Minister in Iran (in 1935) and Egypt (1939-1942). Over the...
Reformulation of the Ideals of Heroism in Bahram Beyzaie’s Dramatic Worlds with Saeed Talajooy In this talk, Saeed Talajooy first introduces his recent edited volume on Bahram Beyzaie and then briefly discusses his two chapters in the book, which analyse...
Staging Piety: The Takkiyya Muʿavin al-Mulk in Kermanshah with Nahid Massoumeh Assemi The Takkiyya Mu’avin al-Mulk is a privately built complex in the city of Kermanshah in western Iran, dedicated to the annual commemoration of the martyrdom of Husayn ibn ‘Ali...
Persian Historiography across Empires with Sholeh Quinn This presentation will discuss some of the main features of Persian historiography under the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Early modern chroniclers engaged in a number of historiographical practices,...
Persian Poetry on the High Seas: Migration and the Making of an Early Modern World Literature with James White Over the course of the seventeenth century, many hundreds of professional poets active in Persian travelled across the western Indian Ocean, moving...
The Reunification of Iran and the Reign of Aqa Muhammad Shah Qajar with Maziar Behrooz After a difficult century of civil wars and foreign intervention, population loss and economic contraction, Iran was finally reunified under the Qajar and the unique...