Event Category Archives: Featured Persian

The Poetics and Politics of Representation: A Comparative Study of ‘Simurgh’ in Four Royal Manuscripts of the Shahnama

The fantastic Simurgh, the mythical bird of ancient Persia, has maintained a significant presence in Persian culture. The visual and textual references to this bird manifest a mysterious and complex symbolism shaped around this super-natural creature in Persian literary sources.

Representation of Sigheh Women in Modern Iranian Cultural Productions

In this talk, analyzing the representation of sigheh (temporary marriage) women literature of the Pahlavi era (1924-1979) and two cinematic works produced after the Islamic Revolution (1979-), it will be argued that these cultural productions reflect the manner in which the practice of sigheh impacts women by calling into question how sexuality works as a form of political analysis and power.

Persian, Pahlavi, and Teaching Farsi

This presentation will maintain that a cogent knowledge of Middle Persian is in fact crucial in understanding many aspects of Modern Persian grammar, both basic and higher level; and that it enable scholars, teachers and educators obtain a clarity on how to best teach the growing and diverse population of students of Persian Language in schools and universities across North America.

Negotiating Modernity: The Prostitute Character in Iranian Film and Fiction

This talk will scrutinize the image of the prostitute and her inflationary popularity in written and visual texts from the Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911) to the Islamic Revolution (1979) to shed light on the shifts in discourse on prostitution in the twentieth-century Iran.

Love and Punishment in Persian Literature: Story-Reading with Shahriar Mandanipour

    The Department of Asian Studies and Persian Literature Reading Club at the University of British Columbia are delighted to invite the readers and admirers of Modern Persian Literature to join this special event: “Love and Punishment in Persian Literature: Story-Reading with Shahriar Mandanipour” This event will be in Persian.  Friday, March 19th, 2021 […]