Blake Atwood, “Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic” (Columbia UP, 2016)
Iranian cinema has close connections to the 1979 Islamic revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini , explicitly pointed to the uses of cinema for religious and revolutionary political purposes. But Iranian films...
26 Jun 201725min
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, “Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment” (U. of Minnesota Press, 2016)
How did the preeminent theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault experience and observe the Iranian revolution? How did he find the revolution disruptive of a teleological notion of history? And how di...
6 Nov 201636min
Jason Mokhtarian, “Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran” (U of California Press, 2015)
In Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran (University of California Press, 2015), Jason Mokhtarian, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studie...
22 Feb 201632min
Afsaneh Najmabadi, "Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran" (Duke UP, 2013)
In her fascinating new book Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2015), Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and of Studies of Women, G...
30 Des 201555min
Naser Ghobadzadeh, “Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State” (Oxford UP, 2014)
While “fundamentalism” and “authoritarian secularism” are commonly perceived as the two mutually exclusive paradigms available to Muslim majority countries Naser Ghobadzadeh‘s new book Religious Secul...
18 Nov 20151h 2min
Gohar Homayounpour, “Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran” (MIT Press, 2012)
In Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (MIT Press, 2012) — part memoir, part elegy, and part collection of clinical vignettes — Gohar Homayounpour takes a defiant position against the Orientalizing gaze of...
19 Des 201455min
Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal, and Sarah Shourd, “A Sliver of Light” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)
In the summer of 2009, Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal, and Sarah Shourd were hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan when they unknowingly crossed into Iran and were captured by a border patrol. Accused of espionage, t...
10 Nov 201453min
Sarah Bowen Savant, “The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
Sarah Bowen Savant, Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at the Aga Khan University in London, addresses important questions about conversion among Persian people...
16 Okt 201456min
