The Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Symposium on Persian Language & Literature: Persian Literature Unbound

Department: Center for Persian Studies and Culture

Date and Time: November 10, 2017 | 9:30 AM-6:00 PM

Event Location: Humanities Gateway (HG) 1010

Event Details


Please join us on Friday, November 10, 2017, 9:45 am - 6 pm in UC Irvine's Humanities Gateway (HG) 1010 for an all day conference, titled "The Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Symposium on Persian Language & Literature:
Persian Literature Unbound".

This symposium has been made possible by the generous donation of Dr. Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali from Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute.

This event is organized by Dr. Nasrin Rahimieh, Howard Baskerville Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine's School of Humanities.

Over the last decade, the field of Persian literary studies has benefited from generous donations by Iranian Americans who have helped establish endowed chairs and/or have underwritten conferences, graduate fellowships, and publications. These forms of support for scholarship on Persian literature in the US academy provide a rare opportunity to re-examine the current defining parameters of the field.

The participants in this conference are invited to reflect on possibilities of redrawing the temporal, geographic, generic, and methodological boundaries that have delimited what we consider to be the proper domain of Persian literature and how we produce knowledge about it. Among questions participants are asked to address are: what types of writing can be considered literature? How might we rethink periodization? Can Persian literature be read across linguistic and national boundaries? How might we study and teach Middle Persian and Persian literature within the broader framework of world literature?

The participants will also be invited to contribute to a volume of essays to be published after the conference.

This event is free and open to the public. No registration is required.