The Farzaneh Family Center for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies made great strides in 2020-2021. The center has expanded its reach by collaborating with other universities, using social media and webinars aggressively, and programming events that will impact policy and public knowledge of Iran.
The research agenda of the core faculty is in full stride; they published two books and several articles. A third book, by Alexander Jabbari, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
In August 2020, a new director, Joshua Landis, was appointed to lead the center. Professor Afshin Marashi stepped down after eight years as director. We are indebted to him for building such a robust and successful program.
The center also has a new Board of Directors that includes Dean Scott Fritzen, Associate Dean Mitchell Smith, Jalal Farzaneh and Mohammad Farzaneh and the director of the center, Joshua Landis.
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Note from New Director Joshua Landis |
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Joshua Landis
Sandra Mackey Chair of Middle East History and Politics and Director, Farzaneh Family Center
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It is an honor to serve as director of the Farzaneh Family Center for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies. My goal is to support the strong research agenda of the faculty and to develop the center’s outreach. We kick-started this effort with an exciting lineup of talks and online debates with leading scholars. Language instruction has been extended to include advanced Persian. We have expanded our Prize for the Best Article on Persian Literature and received over 70 submissions. We continued to build our library holdings with the generous donation of a rich private collection of Persian books. We awarded over $100,000 in scholarships to our students.
We all want to thank the Farzaneh family in general and Mohammad and Jalal Farzaneh in particular for enriching the University of Oklahoma and the state of Oklahoma in more ways than we can count.
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Since 2020, the center has organized 12 events, including: |
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Iran vs. Saudi Arabia: What Policy for the U.S.? This talk featured Vali Nasr, former dean of John Hopkins SIAS, and Greg Gause, head of the international affairs department at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, debating policy in the Gulf. They attracted over 420 participants from nine countries. More than 3,000 have viewed the discussion since it was posted. The shift to Zoom has worked well for the center.
The center's fourth annual Persian Poetry Night, organized by Marjan Seirafi-Pour in November, featured language students reciting and discussing Persian poems. Parents of students from several different countries participated on Zoom. Persian Poetry night has grown to be the biggest event for our center, with around 200 in attendance in 2019. In 2020, we took the event online, which gave it national and international attention.
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In March 2020, the center sponsored both a Persian classical music concert with the Bâmdâd Ensemble at Catlett Music Center and a Persian Cultural Week at Norman Public Library (pictured above) alongside members of the Iranian Student and Iranian Cultural Associations.
Other recent webinars:
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Library Donations
The center received a generous donation of Persian books from Michael C. Hillmann, professor of Persian literature at the University of Texas, who offered his private collection of over 1,000 books. This builds on previous personal library donations from Shaul Bakhash, Michael Van Dusen and Jere Bacharach.
Iranian Studies Best Undergraduate Paper Prize
The Farzaneh Family Center offers an annual $250 prize for the best undergraduate research paper on a topic in the area of Iranian Studies.
2020 winner: Alyssa Wiley, “The Tudeh Party in Iran From 1941-1953: A Tool of the Soviet Union or a National Evolution of Iranian Politics”
2021 winner: Gabriela Ramirez-Perez, The Periphery Takes Center Stage: Behind the Scenes in the Medieval Islamic World”
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Farzaneh Best Article Prize
The Jafar and Shokoh Farzaneh Prize for Best Article on Persian Literature has attracted 75 submissions. Alexander Jabbari chairs the prize committee, which will announce the award winner at the Middle East Studies Association conference in October. This competition has received a tremendous attention from scholars of Persian literature around the world. We have received 52 articles in Persian language from scholars in Iran and 25 articles in English from scholars in America, Canada and Europe.
Scholarships
During the 2020-21 academic year, 48 Iranian students have received $96,000 in scholarships and eight Persian language students have received the Farzaneh Family Persian Language Scholarships of $1,000.
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Gabriela Ramirez-Perez was awarded the 2021 Iranian Studies Best Undergraduate Paper Prize for her paper, "The Periphery Takes Center Stage: Behind the Scenes in the Medieval Islamic World." The $250 prize is awarded annually to a research paper focusing on any topic or time period relating to the history, culture, politics and society of Iran and the Persian-speaking world. According to Committee Chair Alexander Jabbari, "The committee agreed that Gabriela's paper was very well written and did an excellent job of synthesizing scholarship on premodern Iranian and Islamic history."
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Marashi's current and upcoming projects include a short article on the history of printing technology in modern Iran; an article on the economic history of Parsi investment in Iran in the early 20th century; and a new book project on the religious history of Indo-Iranian culture in the 20th century, with a focus on the life and work of Meher Baba.
Finally, Marashi is also co-editing a new book series at University of Texas Press, titled "Connected Histories of the Middle East and the Global South."
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Manata Hashemi is Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies in the Department of International and Area Studies. In 2020, Hashemi published articles in The Conversation, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and From the Square. She also published her first book, Coming of Age in Iran, with NYU Press. The book has been reviewed in the journals Social Forces and Iranian Studies and Hashemi has given talks on her book at UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and the Association of Middle East Children and Youth Studies. In April, Hashemi organized the virtual workshop, “Ethnographies of Iran: Dignity, Power, and Transnational Politics,” at OU.
Hashemi is currently working on her second book project, “Tarnished: Dignity and Labor in Iran,” which examines the claims making practices of the stigmatized working poor in the Islamic Republic. Hashemi is also embarking on a new, multi-year research study examining how poor, Middle Eastern and Latina/o/x young adults in the United States experience and respond to ethno-racialized and classed stigmatization.
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Alexander Jabbari is Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Persian Language and Literature in the Department of International and Area Studies. This academic year, he received a contract from Cambridge University Press for his book The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India. The book will be published in Cambridge’s Global Middle East series. He also published an article, “Sinicizing Islam: Translating the Gulistan of Sa‘di in Modern China” (co-authored with Yun-Chu Tsai), in International Journal of Islam in Asia.
Jabbari was invited to give virtual talks at the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He also presented at the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference.
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Marjan Seirafi-Pour is Farzaneh Family Instructor of Persian in the Department of Modern Languages, Literature and Linguistics and outreach coordinator for the Farzaneh Family Center. She has been teaching Beginner and Intermediate Persian since 2013, and in 2020 she began teaching Advanced Persian due to increasing enthusiasm and interest from students.
Seirafi-Pour also coordinates the Persian Idiom Project, which continues its path to teach our students Persian on an intimate level. She has found that students enjoy unlocking the secret language of idioms in Persian and finding its similarities with English.
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Aman Golshan, Graduate Assistant
Aman has been an invaluable asset for our center. He has spearheaded the translation of all donated Persian books and is preparing them to be catalogued into our main library system.
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Elina Heydari, Persian Language Tutor
Elina provides immense support for our students to be successful in their Persian courses and helps them to strengthen their language skills.
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Manata Hashemi
Fall 2021
- Anti-Muslim Racism
- Poverty-Inequality in the Middle East
Fall 2020
- Poverty-Inequality Middle East
- Youth Culture in Iran
Spring 2020
- Iranian Society through Cinema
- Women & Gender Middle East
Alexander Jabbari
Fall 2021
- Language & Politics
- Beginner Persian I
Spring 2021
- Sexuality/Identity Islam World
Fall 2020
- Understanding Global Community
Joshua Landis
Fall 2021
- International Relations in the Middle East
Spring 2021
Fall 2020
- The Middle East Since WWI
Spring 2020
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Afshin Marashi
Fall 2021
- Modern Iran
- Capstone: Nations/Nationalism
Spring 2021
Fall 2020
- Modern Iran
- Nationalism & the Middle East
Spring 2020
Marjan Seirafi-Pour
Fall 2021
- Intermediate Persian I
- Advanced Persian I
Spring 2021
- Beginner Persian II
- Intermediate Persian II
- Advanced Persian II
Fall 2020
- Beginner Persian I
- Intermediate Persian I
- Advanced Persian I
- Independent Study
Summer 2020
- Independent Study
- Tâbestân Book Club (Persian Book Club)
- Persian Poetry of Our Lives
Spring 2020
- Beginner Persian II
- Intermediate Persian II
- Independent Study
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The Iranian Student Newsletter, a publication of the David L. Boren College of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma, was produced at no cost to the taxpayers of the state of Oklahoma.
The University of Oklahoma is an equal opportunity institution. ou.edu/eoo
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Visit the Farzaneh Family Center online: |
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