Stanford Iranian Studies Program

By Stanford Iranian Studies Program

The Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies fosters the interdisciplinary study of Iran as a civilization. Each academic year, the Program offers undergraduate courses related to Iran ... more

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FAQs about Stanford Iranian Studies Program:

How many episodes does Stanford Iranian Studies Program have?

The podcast currently has 174 episodes available.

Stanford Iranian Studies Program episodes:

November 05, 2021 On Ebrahim Golestan: An Inquiry into "Tide and Mist"
November 5, 2021
Speaker: Sahand Abidi
Sahand Abidi is an essayist and critic. He studied drama at the fine arts faculty of Tehran University. He worked as a playwright, dramaturge, assistant director and actor in theatre, and taught courses on the history of theater. He has worked in different capacities on numerous films, documentaries and plays. Many of his essays on aspects of modern Iranian theatre, cinema, and literature (on Beyzaie, Chubak, Golestan, Kimiai, Nalbandian, etc.) have been published in various journals and books. He was a panelist in Stanford’s conference celebrating the life and work of Bahram Beyzaie.
This talk is in Persian.
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55min
October 22, 2021 Image and Words in the Films and Stories of Ebrahim Golestan
October 22, 2021
Speaker: Ameneh Yousefi
Ameneh Yousefi was born in Hamedan city in Iran. She received her Doctoral in Persian Literature from the University of Karaj. She has done several auditorial, visual and animated projects as an author for Local National Broadcasting. She currently teaches Persian Literature in Ganjname University in Hamedan City and is researching the representation of intellectual figures in ten contemporary Persian novels. Her talk covers the inter-textual relations between words and images in Ebrahim Golestan’s films and fiction.
This talk is in Persian.
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40min
October 21, 2021 White Torture: The Infamy of Solitary Confinement in Iran with Narges Mohammadi
September 29, 2021
Narges Mohammadi in conversation with Darius Rejali and Abbas Milani.
Narges Mohammadi is Deputy Director of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre (DHRC). She was elected as President of the Executive Committee of the National Council of Peace in Iran, a broad coalition against war and for the promotion of human rights. She has campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty in Iran and was awarded the Per Anger Prize by the Swedish government for her human rights work in 2011. In a two volume study, called White Torture, she underscores how solitary confinement is indeed an insidious form of torture. She has interviewed many of Iran’s dissidents who have been subjected to solitary confinement. Based on these conversations, she has also produced a documentary.
Darius Rejali, professor of political science at Reed College, is an internationally recognized expert on government torture and interrogation. Iranian-born, Rejali has spent his career reflecting on violence, specifically, on the causes, consequences, and meaning of modern torture in our world. His award-winning work spans concerns in political science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, and critical social theory. He is the author of "Torture and Democracy" (2007), "Torture and Modernity: Self, Society, and State in Modern Iran" (1994), and many related articles. He consults as an expert for international scholarly projects on torture prevention, serves as an adviser to nongovernmental organizations that work on torture-related issues, and has submitted expert testimony for Guantanamo (Al Ginco v. Obama) and Abu Ghraib related cases (Al Shimari v. CACI International). He has been interviewed widely, from Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! to David Frost on Al Jazeera, from the BBC to the Washington Post.
Abbas Milani is the Director of the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a research fellow at The Hoover Institution. He taught at Tehran University, Faculty of Law and Political Science until 1986. He has written and translated many books and articles. Most recently, he edited and wrote the introduction for "A Window into Modern Iran: The Ardeshir Zahedi Papers at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives," and "Saadi and Humanism" with Maryam Mirzadeh.
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1h 13min
August 12, 2021 SGS Summer Film Festival: Cafe Transit
August 11, 2021
Speaker: Fereshteh Sadreorafaei
Fereshteh Sadreorafaei was born in Tehran, Iran in 1962. From a young age, she attended the Children and Adolescents' Intellectual Development Center. There, she studied theater and puppetry and staged several puppet shows. From 1974-1976, she was a student at Pars National Ballet under the supervision of Abdullah Nazemi.
Due to the Iranian Revolution and closure of universities, she was unable to acquire a university education. During which time she got married and started a family. She worked as a puppet actress in a children’s TV series, using what she learned from the Intellectual Development Center.
Her first professional theater performance was in 1983, followed by her debut in cinema in 1985.
She went on to narrate and puppeteer in 17 series and films, directed four TV series for children and teenagers, acted in 20 films, and acted in one unreleased TV series. She has collaborated with directors such as Jafar Panahi, Kambozia Partovi, Reza Mirkarimi, Abdolreza Kahani, Mohammad Rasoulov, Maziar Miri, Narges Abyar, Massoud Bakhshi and, in her latest film Ghahraman, Asghar Farhadi.
She has been nominated for and received numerous awards, including several for Café Transit.
About the film:
Written and directed by Kambuzia Partovi (2005).
Synopsis: In a village near Iran's border with Turkey, Reyhan (Fereshteh Sadreorafaei), a young woman with two children, faces a difficult choice when her husband dies. Instead of marrying her brother-in-law (Parviz Parastoei), as required by traditional law, she chooses to support her family by reopening her late husband's restaurant.
Part of Stanford Festival of Iranian Arts.
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1h 1min
July 21, 2021 President Carter's Handling of the Iranian Revolution and Hostage Crisis: Discussion with Kai Bird
July 18, 2021
Kai Bird discusses President Jimmy Carter's interaction with Iran as a part of his new book, "The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter" (Crown, 2021).
More about the book: "Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping-stone to greater achievements. But in retrospect the Carter political odyssey is a rich and human story, marked by both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity. In this deeply researched, brilliantly written account, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Kai Bird expertly unfolds the Carter saga as a tragic tipping point in American history."
Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who has published biographies of John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Ames—and now "The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter." He has also authored a memoir about his childhood in the Middle East. He is the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
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56min
June 29, 2021 The Nonviolent Revolution of Iranian Women Writers: A Conversation with Farzaneh Milani
June 24, 2021
Professor Farzaneh Milani discusses Iranian women writers and the Iranian women’s movement with Professor Abbas Milani. The conversation is a part of the on-going series on the Iranian women’s movement.
Farzaneh Milani is Raymond J. Nelson Professor of Iranian and Gender Studies and Cavaliers’ Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Virginia. She is the former Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures and past Director of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and holds a joint appointment in both departments. Milani has published books and articles in Persian and English. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, Reader's Digest International, and USA Today, among others. She has presented more than 270 lectures nationally and internationally.
Part of the Stanford Festival of Iranian Arts.
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53min
June 05, 2021 Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses: Sensory readings of Persian literature (A Hafezian Banquet)
May 27, 2021
Literary research premised on sensory studies challenges above all the monopolization of modern Persian literary criticism by socio-political discourses, which generally rely on content-based approaches constructing "committed readings" of literary production. "Committed readings" circumscribe the significance of the literary by allowing the text to only be a site of resistance and calls to action, thus foreclosing opportunities for alternative readings. Sensory studies challenge the limits of such approaches, and this confrontation takes place in the fields of aesthetics-stylistics and literary readings.
Mehdi Khorrami, Emeritus Professor, New York University, is the author of "Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction: Who Writes Iran" (2014), and "Modern Reflections of Classical Traditions in Persian Fiction" (2003), and a number of essays and book chapters on the rhetorical and aesthetic dynamics of Persian modernist writing and contemporary Persian prison literature. He has also co-edited and co-translated a number of books, including: "Fayz Muhammad Katib Hazrah’s Afghan Genealogy and Memoir of the Revolution" (2019), "Moments of Silence: Authenticity in the Cultural Expressions of the Iran-Iraq War, 1980–1988" (2016), "Vol. 4 of The History of Afghanistan: Fayz Muhammad Kātib’s Sirāj al-tawārıkh" (2016), "A Persian Mosaic: Essays: Essays on Persian Language, Literature and Film in Honor of M. R. Ghanoonparvar" (2015), "Vol. 3 of The History of Afghanistan: Fayz Muhammad Kātib’s Sirāj al-tawārıkh" (2013), "Sohrab’s Wars: Counter-Discourses of Contemporary Persian Fiction: A Collection of Short Stories and a Film Script" (2008), "Critical Encounters: Essays on Persian Literature and Culture in Honor of Peter J. Chelkowski" (2007), "Another Sea, Another Shore: Persian Stories of Migration" (2004), "A Feast in the Mirror: Stories by Contemporary Iranian Women" (2000), "A Feast in the Mirror: Stories by Contemporary Iranian Women" (in Persian, 2002), "A World Between: Poems and Short Stories by Iranian-Americans" (1999).
Prof. Khorrami’s lecture was originally accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation and the video is forthcoming. The images used are accessible at the following links:
"Allegory of Sight and Smell" (1618) by Jan Brueghel the Elder, Hendrick van Balen the Elder, and Gerard Seghers, courtesy Museo del Prado, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Brueghel_(I),_Hendrick_van_Balen_(I)_and_Gerard_Seghers_-_Allegory_of_Sight_and_Smell.jpg
"The Senses of Hearing, Touch and Taste" (1618) by Jan Brueghel the Elder, courtesy Museo del Prado, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:File-Bruegel_d._Ä.,_Jan_-The_Senses_of_Hearing,_Touch_and_Taste_-_1618.jpg
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37min
June 05, 2021 The Economic Cost of the Islamic Revolution and War for Iran with Mohammad Reza Farzanegan
May 20, 2021
This study estimates the joint effect of a new political regime and war against Iraq, on Iran’s per capita Gross Domestic Product (‘GDP,’ constant 2010 US$) for the period 1978–1988, during the revolution/war. Professor Mohammad Reza Farzanegan uses a synthetic control approach, whereby a synthetic Iran is constructed as a weighted average of other Middle East and North Africa (‘MENA’)/Organization of the Petroleum Exporting (‘OPEC’) countries to match the average level of some key per capita GDP correlates over the period 1970–1977 as well as the evolution of the actual Iranian per capita GDP during that period. He finds a sizable negative effect of the joint treatment. The average Iranian lost an accumulated sum of approximately US $34,660 during 1978–1988 (i.e. the average annual real per capita income loss of US $3,150). This loss equals 40% of the real income per capita, which an Iranian could earn in the absence of revolution and war.
Mohammad Reza Farzanegan is a Professor in Economics of the Middle East (since 2012) at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) & School of Business and Economics of Philipps-Universität Marburg in Germany. He is the coordinating professor for the international master study program of Economics of the Middle East in Marburg. He is an ERF Research Fellow, and CESifo Research Network Fellow. His main areas of research are political economy, development economics, energy economics, and empirical institutional economics. His research has been published in edited volumes and international journals. He gained his PhD in Economics from the Technische Universität Dresden with the research grant of DAAD (2006-2009). He received the Georg Forster Research Fellowship for postdoctoral researchers from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for his project at ZEW Mannheim & TU Dresden (2010-2012). He obtained his MSc degree in Energy Economics & Marketing from University of Tehran (2000-2003) and his BA in Theoretical Economics from Allameh Tabatabaei University in Tehran (1995-1999).
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31min
June 05, 2021 The Iranian Women's Movement: A Conversation with Kian Katouzian
May 6, 2021
Kian Katouzian discusses her life as a working woman in Iran, participating in the opposition against the Shah and then against Khomeini before leaving Iran for a life of exile in France. She discusses the feelings of loneliness and disorientation while living in exile.
She earned a master’s degree in education in Iran in the 1960s, was a professor of history and geography for more than twenty years, and was head of a high school. She was the editor-in-chief of "Jonbeche," a newspaper opposed to the Shah’s regime.
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59min
May 04, 2021 Translating Ulysses into Persian: A Century of Censorship with Akram Pedramnia
April 22, 2021
Translating a work that employs inventive literary techniques is an already arduous task, however, negotiating with a system of imposed censorship makes the process of translating and publishing increasingly more intricate. In this talk, Akram Pedramnia explores the challenges of translating modernist works, like "Lolita," "Tender is the Night," as well as "Ulysses," under a system of imposed censorship and discusses the methods she employs to evade it.
Akram Pedramnia is an Iranian-Canadian author and translator. She has published three novels in Persian. Among others, she has translated F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "Tender is the Night" (2009), Vladimir Nabokov’s "Lolita" (2013), and James Joyce’s "Ulysses" (2019). She is a recipient of the Friends of the 2019 Zurich James Joyce Foundation Scholarship and the 2020 Joyce Translation Scholarship and Looren Residency. Her translation of "Ulysses" received a Literature Ireland Translation Grant. She has been a guest speaker in the English Literature Department of New York University during the academic years of 2019 and 2020 and a lecturer at University College Dublin in 2018. She is an active member of the International James Joyce Foundation.
Event is in Persian/Farsi. Part of the Stanford Festival of Iranian Arts.
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56min

FAQs about Stanford Iranian Studies Program:

How many episodes does Stanford Iranian Studies Program have?

The podcast currently has 174 episodes available.