Authority in Attire: The Politics of Moral Order in Iran with Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet This presentation considers the continuing controversies around state-sanctioned unveiling and reveiling in Iran. I will focus on how clothing became a way to exert...
Literature in the Service of Monolingualism: Turkophobia in Modernist Persian Poetry with Leila Rahimi Bahmany The published monograph Azeri Turkish Narratives in 20th-Century Iran: Resisting Monolingualism, exposes how modern Iranian intellectuals,...
Mehmandari: Hosting and Minding Foreign Visitors in Safavid and Qajar Iran with Rudi Matthee Mehmandari, the practice of having foreigners visiting in an official capacity welcomed, accompanied, and provided for by the host country, is very old in Iran....
Peering Through the Cracks. Polish Musicians in Tehran 1942 to 1945: The Case of Irena Valdi-Gołębiowska with Laudan Nooshin In the spring and summer of 1942, an estimated 300,000 Poles arrived in Iran, having travelled thousands of miles from recently...
An Archaeological Perspective on the Mongol Conquest of Central Asia with Katie Campbell Persian historians describe the Mongol conquest of the Khwarzmian Empire in the early thirteenth century as catastrophic, with cities razed and populations...
Persia’s Greek Campaigns: Kingship, War, & Spectacle with John Hyland The wars between the Achaemenid Persian empire and the Greek city-states are among the most famous conflicts in world history – above all Xerxes’ expedition of 480-479 BCE, which...
Material Networks: The Chehel Sotun Carpet Between Iran and the Deccan with Margaret Squires This talk traces the little-known history of a massive carpet woven in the Deccan for the Chehel Sotun palace in seventeenth-century Isfahan. Dismantled and...
Jane Dieulafoy’s Persia: Gender, Empire, and Archaeology in fin-de-siècle France with Julia Hartley The archaeologist, photographer, and writer Jane Dieulafoy (1851–1916) worked at the intersection of nineteenth-century power structures. They served...
Beyond the Botanical with Persian collections at Kew Gardens’ Library and Archives with Shabnam Balouch & Isabel Lauterjung This talk explores Persian materials in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, focusing on the unexpected cultural and social...
Iran and Afghanistan: Toward a Connected (Literary) History with Aria Fani Contrary to the presumption that literary nationalism in the Global South emerged solely through contact with Europe, Reading across Borders shows how the cultural forms of Iran...