The Discovery of Iran: Taghi Arani, a Radical Cosmopolitan

THE DISCOVERY OF IRAN offers a fresh perspective on Iranian nationalism, centring its analysis on critical intellectual debates emanating from a transnational experience of community of Iranian émigrés, activists, and scholars in 1920s Weimar Berlin, and later in Iran until the mid 1930s. The book pays special attention to the writings of a particularly innovative activist intellectual, Taghi Arani, to argue that the interwar period was marked by a robust civil society that routinely debated questions of identity, history, and Iran’s place in a rapidly changing world.

ALI MIRSEPASSI is Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University. He is 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. His recent books include, The Discovery of Iran: Taghi Arani, a Radical Cosmopolitan (Stanford University Press, Fall 2021); and Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State (October 2019, Cambridge University Press). His memoir, The Loneliest Revolution: A Memoir of Solidarity and Struggle in Iran, will be published by Edinburgh University Press, March 2023.