Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies
About
Current research interests:
My area of specialization is classical Persian literature, especially the epic, lyric, panegyric, romantic, and didactic verse of the tenth to fifteenth centuries: the interplay of love and politics in ʿOnsori, Farrokhi, and Masʿud-e Saʿd-e Salman, the ambiguity and skepticism of Ferdowsi, Khayyam, and Hafez, the ethics of Nezami and Sa’di, the homiletic exhortations of ʿAttar and Rumi, the “neo-romances” of Amir Khosrow and Khwaju, and the cosmographies of Naser-e Khosrow and Jami are among the topics that have occupied my attention. Chief among these interests is the study of the romantic/epic narratives of classical Persian literature from the standpoint of narrative, structure, morality, gender, context, and intertext. In my doctoral thesis, I studied the three earliest extant romances in Persian—Vameq & Azra, Varqa & Golshah, and Vis & Ramin, all dating to the first half of the 11th century CE—to study how these texts reference, elaborate, innovate, and depart from antecedents found in Greek, Arabic, and Pahlavi literature in their formation of a distinctive literary genre in (New) Persian. I am especially intrigued by Vis & Ramin, a remarkable work that inspired me to study how selfhood and subjectivity are articulated along the axes of gender, power, and love. At the broadest level, I am interested in how the very concept of “romantic love” gained such currency in the courtly literatures of Persia to France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE, and to that end, narratives written in Georgian, Greek, Arabic, and early Romance languages play an important role in this project.
Beyond this focus, I am also interested in the art and literature of modern Iran and its neighbors; this includes comparative studies of neoclassical poetry, the free-verse movement, cinema, literary history, and the novel, novella, and short story forms in the last century in both Persian and Arabic. Topics that I find myself turning to repeatedly in this field include the representation, performance, and politics of gender, translation studies and world literature, allusions to the classical past, aesthetics, and stylistics.
Current projects:
My current book project is a monograph on the aforementioned Vis & Ramin by Fakhroddin Gorgani. This project is both a literary and intellectual history, in which I investigate the emergence of the ‘romance’ as a literary genre and the idea of ‘romantic love’ as an ethical praxis within this generic tradition, tracing how the interplay of these two branches produces a work that raises deep existential challenges for the individual subject through the problematization of classic topoi like female chastity, male sovereignty, and sacrifice and redemption in the name of love. I also re-examine the tradition of minstrelsy in Parthian and Sasanian literature and examine how this oral element interfaces with the written and literary aspects of Gorgani’s poem through embedded performances and multiple narrators.
Alongside this monograph, I am working on a number of articles that touch on the following topics: the “rise of the romance” in Persian, Greek, and European literature; the implications of Alexander’s quest for immortality in the Shāhnāma; speech, silence, and symbols in the Haft Paykar; and the question of genre in classical/medieval Persian narrative. I’m also chipping away at a number of translations, including ʿAyyuqi’s Varqa & Golshāh and a few works of contemporary prose and poetry.
Teaching interests:
The courses I teach include an introduction to Iranian cinema, surveys of Persian literature in translation, a comparative course in the medieval romance, and specific text/author courses for students with a background in Persian: Ferdowsi’s Shahnama, Sa’di’s Golestan, the Quintet of Nezami, Vis & Ramin, and modernist poetry. In addition, I am collaborating with my colleagues to develop gateway courses in Near Eastern Studies; these will likely include a course on travelers and travelogues, and another on sex and politics.