Nima Naghibi is Chair and Associate Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her research is in the areas of postcolonial and diaspora studies, and life narratives with particular attention to questions of human rights and social justice. She is the author of the books Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora (Minnesota Press, 2016) and Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran (Minnesota Press, 2007), and many essays and articles.

Speaker Majid Roshangar, editor in chief of the Persian Book Review since 1965, had a long and distinguished career as a publisher, editor, and author in Iran. He also holds an MA in Government from the University of New South Wales, Australia and served in Iran’s Foreign Service in the 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker Kamran Talattof provides analysis of Iranian women's bestselling novels of the last two decades, placing them in the context within which they were published and read to reveal what they say about society's desire for reform, democracy, and civility.

Speaker: Houchang Chehabi discusses the close relationship Iran and South Africa have had since the 1970s and the evolution of this relationship, touching on politics, economics, and religion.

Arash Khazeni earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University and teaches Middle Eastern and Eurasian history at Pomona College. His research is focused on the imperial and environmental histories of the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. His publications include Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (Seattle:...

Mohsen Kadivar is an Iranian dissident in exile, public intellectual, Muslim theologian, Nanner O. Koehane Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, visiting Research Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, and a global ethics fellow with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. http://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/event/the_complexity_of_leadership_of_islamic_republic_of_iran

Abolala Soudavar completed his university education at the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris (1963-67), Stanford University (1967-68) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Pratiques, Paris (1980-81). As a businessman he was involved in Iran from 1969 to 1982, when he moved to the USA and established Mirak Inc. He was Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Tehran University from 1970 to 1977. http://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/event/mithraic_societies_from_brotherhood_to_religions_adversary

Ali Dehbashi has been the editor-in-chief of Bukhara since 1999, a periodical focusing on Iranian and world cultures and literatures. He has authored several books and edited over seventy volumes on Iranian history and literature. He has allocated special issues of Bukhara to world thinkers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Gunter Grass, Osip Mandelstam, Umberto Eco, Hannah Arendt, and Virginia Woolf. As the curator of Nights of Bukhara, a highly acclaimed lecture series in Tehran, Dehbashi has...

Reza Zarghamee brings multiple perspectives and deep knowledge to his account of the life of Cyrus the Great. http://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/event/discovering_cyrus_and_the_idea_of_iran_from_the_cartoons_of_the_300_to_the_craft_of_history

Parinoush Saniee is an Iranian born writer. She was trained as a psychologist but has garnered an international reputation as a writer of fiction that focuses on the plight of Iranian women. Her work is especially intriguing because she combines her experience as a psychologist with her talent as a writer of fiction. Her first book, My Share, has been translated in 26 languages and has won several awards, including Spain’s Euskadi de Plata Prize in 2015, and was the International Prize winner...

Pouya Afshar is an alumnus from the California Institute of Arts Character Animation department and is a graduate of University of California Los Angeles Graduate Department of Film and Television focusing in Animation and Digital Media. http://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/event/animation_trends_in_iran_after_the_revolution

Maryam Kamali, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, focuses on the social history and historiography of the Middle East and Central Asia. She contributes articles about the history of Iran in medieval and early modern times to scientific journals of universities and the Encyclopedia Iranica. To foster communication among interested scholars she has established the interdisciplinary Iranian Medieval History website...

Amir Ahmadi Arian is an Iranian writer and translator, a PhD graduate of comparative literature from the University of Queensland, Australia. In Iran, he has published a collection of stories, Fragments of a Crime in 2005, and his novel, The Cogwheels, published in 2009, was shortlisted for Golshiri award. He has worked with various Iranian newspapers and literary magazines, and translated novels by Paul Auster, Cormac Mccarthy, E.L. Doctorow, and P.D James into Persian. His work in English...

The son of an American father and Iranian mother, Cyrus M. Copeland moved to Iran with his family at age 10. In his new book, Off the Radar, he writes about his personal experience with the 1979 revolution and beyond. He has traveled widely and has appeared on TV, NPR, BBC, and Voice of America and has written about his experiences for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, and the Huffington Post. http://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/media/audio/tinker_tailor_father_spy

Does morality come from God, as many religions believe, offering a foundation of theocracy, or could there be biological explanations that have more to do with evolution than Divine design? In this lecture, De Waal will discuss the sense of fairness in animals and will review expressions of empathy in animals. http://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/event/evolution_of_goodness_empathy_in_animals_and_humans

Massoud Behnoud is an Iranian journalist and writer and lifelong proponent of freedom of speech and press. He worked in many prominent news and media organizations in Iran that were shut down by the Islamic Republic after 1979, their staff prosecuted and he himself spending time in prison. He has founded newspapers and magazines and also authored 17 books on contemporary Iranian history, compilations of short essays and stories, and biographical historical novels. He has been working as a...

Massoud Behnoud, a prominent Iranian journalist and writer, was born on 27 July 1947 in Tehran. He started his work as a journalist in 1964. During his long career he worked as an investigating journalist for different publications and founded more than 20 newspapers and magazines, none of which are currently in publication.(Lecture in Persian) http://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/event/diaspora_media_failures_accomplishments_and_future_role

Zakeri finished his Ph.D. studies in Near Eastern History at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City in 1987. The title of his Dissertation was Sasanian Soldiers in Early Muslim Society: the Origins of the 'Ayyaran and Futuwwa (an expanded revised version of this was published, Wiesbaden 1995). He taught medieval and Islamic history courses at the University of Utah (1984-1987). Working as a Research Fellow at the University of Frankfurt, he prepared the results of a research project published...

Hailed as “the Bob Dylan of Iran” by the New York Times, Mohsen Namjoo is a visionary artist who speaks for and touches the souls of today’s youth. Seamlessly blending the Classical with the Modern, the ancient with the current, Mohsen Namjoo is a true musical maverick. http://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/event/evolution_of_iranian_rhythms