The 60th episode of Parse is a lecture given by Amir Ganjavie on Iranian movies in international film festivals and the intersection of politics and arts surrounding their inclusion at these festivals.  

Amir Ganjavi, who has a Ph.D. in communication and culture from York University, is a Toronto-based writer, cultural critic, festival director, community activist, and filmmaker. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK_4EtuT4mo&t=457s 

The 59th episode of Parse is an excerpt of a lecture given by Razak Khan. Razak’s thesis revisits the question of desire and the making of poetic subjectivity in the Persianate literary archives of South Asia. It examines the nom de plume, life and poetry of Dagh Dehlvi, Munni Bai Hijab and Mir Yar Ali Khan Jan Sahib in the Persianate milieu of nineteenth-century Delhi, Rampur, Calcutta and Hyderabad. The paper attempts to read poetry as an affective archive of forbidden desires and emotions. Following Lacanian psychoanalytical approach, Khan proposes reading the desire for the “Other” in poetry to rethink our conventional understanding of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity. 

Dr. Razak Khan is a Research Fellow in the History Research Group at the University of Göttingen.  His book, Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions and Belonging in Princely Rampur was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoDxAQw2Tlo&t=597s 

The 58th episode of Parse is an excerpt of a talk given by Farshid Kazemi the new and emerging horror genre in Iranian cienma.  

Farshid Kazemi is Sessional Lecturer at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University. He holds a PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Edinburgh with a thesis on Iranian Cinema and Psychoanalysis. His research interests combine an interdisciplinary and theoretical approach to Film and Media Studies, Iranian Studies, and Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. His work has appeared in academic journals such as Camera Obscura, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and Iranian Studies.  

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkeZhcAMAVo&t=230s 

The 57th episode of Parse is an excerpt of talk given by Khatereh Sheibani on pioneer female directors, writers, and producers in Iranian cinema.  

Khatereh Sheibani is a researcher of Iranian cinema and Persian literature. She has established Persian studies at York University, Canada, where she is currently teaching courses on Persian literature and culture, Iranian cinema, and Middle Eastern cinemas. Khatereh completed her doctorate degree in Comparative Literature and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada in 2007. She has written articles on modern Persian literature, Iranian cinema and Middle Eastern cinemas in literary and film anthologies and journals such as Iranian Studies and Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Her book entitled The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Film after the Revolution was published in November 2011. Khatereh has been consulted and interviewed on issues regarding Iranian cinema by broadcasting services and journals such as CBC, PRI, and the New York Times.  

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQw-N6anAIY&t=612s 

The 56th episode of Parse is an excerpt of talk given by Claudia Yaghoobi which focuses on the Iranian-Armenian poet and artist Sonia Balassanian’s works, Yaghoobi argues that Balassanian treats writing (and art generally) as a medium which allows her to write the impossible, namely the 1915 Armenian Genocide. 

Claudia Yaghoobi is a Roshan Institute Associate Professor in Persian Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Transnational Culture in the Iranian Armenian Diaspora  published in 2023, Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Iranian Literature and Film published in 2020, Subjectivity in ‘Attar, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism published in 2017. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6v0RvqJess&t=6s 

The 55th episode of Parse is an excerpt of a talk given by Fatemeh Keshavarz the potentially undesirable implications of the category “women poets.” in light of the ongoing and extensive current research on Iranian women poets. In this presentation, Kehsavarz discusses the poems of Parvin Etesami, Ahmad Shamlou, Forough Farrokhzad and Simin Behbahani in order to explore the pros and cons of gendering their work. 

Fatemeh Keshavarz-Karamustafa, born and raised in the city of Shiraz, completed her studies in Shiraz University, and University of London. She taught at Washington University in St. Louis for over twenty years where she chaired the Dept. of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from 2004 to 2011. In 2012, Keshavarz joined the University of Maryland as the Roshan Institute Chair in Persian Language and Literature, and Director of the Roshan Institute Center for Persian Studies. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ8-lT3xE2M&t=1380s 

The 54th episode of Parse is an excerpt of a lecture given by Kaveh Askari on his 2022 book, Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran which offers a transcultural history of cinema’s circulation. It draws from multi-sited archives of films, distributor memos, licensing contracts, advertising programs, and audio recordings. The talk specifically focuses on the second chapter of the book, “Circulation Worries,” which tracks the work of those who worried over films, those who operated technologies of sound and image (especially dubbing technologies), and those engaged in the practical management of copyright. Focusing on a few high-profile moments of blockage, unprofitability, and physical reconfiguration of second-hand Hollywood studio prints, this talk redefines these seeming barriers to film circulation in Iran as examples of careful labors of engineering, maintenance, and repair. 

Kaveh Askari is an associate professor in the film studies program at Michigan State University and author of Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood (in 2014). Askari has held service positions with Domitor, the Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. He has also collaborated on several film programs including “Tehran Noir: The Thrillers of Samuel Khachikian” for Il Cinema Ritrovato in 2017. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHmuR6HxpD4&t=1300s 

The 53rd episode of Parse is an excerpt of a lecture given by Roshanak Kheshti. This talk explores the question of diegetic film sound in diasporic Iranian cinema through Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Mitra Tabrizian’s Gholam and Bahman, and Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats. 

Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and affiliate faculty in the Critical Gender Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego and Associate Editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (published by NYU Press in 2015) and Switched-on Bach published in 2019. She is currently completing her third book, tentatively titled “We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Hermeneutics”. Her scholarship has appeared in the Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, Feminist Media Histories, Hypatia, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theater Survey, and Sounding Out! 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxCoIIdYrNk&t=1285s 

The 52nd episode of Parse is an excerpt of a lecture given by Ahoo Najafian on the feminine voice in classical Persian poetry in the complicated network of contexts, including looking at the past through the lens of present, knowing the poets through the gaze of male authors, and composing poetry through the seemingly fixed structure of classical Persian poetics. Najafian focuses on three poets, namely, Mahsati Ganjavi (12th century), Padshah Khatun (13th century), and Jahan Malek Khatun (14th century), as they are represented in poetry anthologies and juxtapose some of their works with those of their male counterparts. 

Ahoo Najafian is Assistant Professor of Religion at Macalester College where she teaches on Islam, gender, arts, and literature. Her research focuses on the intersection of religion. literature, and politics in Iran and intellectual history of the related concepts. She is working on a manuscript, titled Poetic Nation: Iranian Soul and Historical Continuity, on the meaning, production, and consumption of ‘erfan/mysticism in 20th-century Iran through the figure of Hafez, the 14th-century poet. She holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University, M.A in Gender Studies from the University of British Columbia, M.A. and B.A. in English Literature from the University of Tehran. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JauqFRIFmEA&t=199s 

Join host, Yasamin Jameh, in learning about the Arabic documents from early Islamic Khurasan. These documents demonstrate that Khorasan, located in the east of the Abbasid Empire, was the center of innovation in documentary practice and administration.  

The 51st episode of Parse is an excerpt of a lecture given by Professor Geoffrey Khan where he describes the Arabic documents from early Islamic Khurasan or around the 8th century AD. Khan published this research in 2007 and in this lecture, he will discuss the importance of these documents for the understanding of the development of Arabic documentary culture. These documents exhibit innovations in formulae that appear in the Arabic papyri from Egypt several years later. This reflects the fact that the eastern sector of the Abbasid empire was the hub of innovation in documentary practice and administration. 

Geoffrey Khan is Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include philological and linguistic studies of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. He has edited various corpora of documents, including Arabic papyri from early Islamic Egypt, documents from early Islamic Khurasan, and documents from Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt that have been preserved in the Cairo Genizah. He is currently working on documents from the Fatimid period that were discovered in Qaṣr Ibrīm in Nubia by the Egypt Exploration Society. He also works on aspects of the history of the Arabic language, in particular the development of Judaeo-Arabic at various historical periods, including the modern spoken varieties, on which he has carried out fieldwork. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg89yfKQ0Lo&t=342s