Woman, Life, Freedom: A Conversation on Iran’s Ongoing Protest Movement and Struggles in US Academia

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh:

Panel Discussion: Woman, Life, Freedom:

A Conversation on Iran's Ongoing Protest Movement and Struggles in US Academia

Mehrzad Boroujerdi is Vice Provost and Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Education at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Previously he was Professor of Government and International Affairs and Director of the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, and before that professor of political science at Syracuse University.

Boroujerdi is the author or co-author of four books: Post-revolutionary Iran: A Political Handbook (Syracuse University Press, 2018), Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and Theory of Statecraft (Syracuse University Press, 2017); Tarashidam, Parastidam, Shikastam: Guftarhay-i dar Siyasat va Huvyiyat-i Irani (I Carved, Worshiped and Shattered: Essays on Iranian Politics and Identity)(Cambridge, 2022); and Iranian Intellectuals and the West: Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse University Press, 1996).

Mr. Boroujerdi has been President of the Association for Iranian Studies, a fellow of the American Council on Education, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, a visiting scholar at UCLA, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute (Washington, D.C.), and a Co-PI of Iran Data Portal.

Fatemeh Shams is a poet and specialist in Persian literature. She earned her Ph.D. in Oriental Studies from University of Oxford, Wadham College. Before joining Penn, she has taught Persian language and literature in various academic institutions including University of Oxford, University of SOAS and Courtauld Institute of Art in the United Kingdom. Her academic work focuses on the intersection of literature, politics, and society. Fatemeh is interested in the evolution of poetry and patronage in the Persian literary tradition and the representation and transformation of this relationship in modern Iran. She has published articles and book chapters on poetry, patronage, and politics in the Iranian context. Her critical monograph A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option Under the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2021) is the first comprehensive study of the intersection of poetry and politics in post-revolutionary Iran. She is also an award-winning poet with three poetry collections. Fatemeh has been an outspoken dissident intellectual who has been living in exile since 2009 Green Uprising. She has been closely involved in the current uprising and has been so far interviewed by CNN, BBC World Service, Washington Post, Vice, and New Yorker amongst other platforms.

Nahid Siamdoust has been researching and reporting about Iran as an academic and journalist for over twenty years. She is currently an assistant professor of media and Middle East studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, was the inaugural Yarshater Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, and a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School. Nahid is the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford, 2017). Previously, she was an Iran correspondent for Time Magazine and a Middle East correspondent for Al Jazeera International. Her recent commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy, BBC, and NPR.
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Ali Mirsepassi is Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University. He is Director, Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and also director of Iranian Studies Initiative at NYU. Mirsepassi was a 2007-2009 Carnegie Scholar and is the co-editor, with Arshin Adib-Moghadam, of The Global Middle East, a book series published by the Cambridge University Press. He is the author of Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State (October 2019, Cambridge University Press); Iran’s Troubled Modernity: Debating Ahmad Fardid’s Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid (Cambridge University Press, 2017), co-author, with Tadd Fernee, of Islam, Democracy, and Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge University Press, 2014); is the author of Political Islam, Iran and Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Democracy in Modern Iran (New York University Press, 2010); Intellectual Discourses and Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Truth or Democracy (published in Iran); and he is the co-editor of Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World (Syracuse University Press, 2002).