In the 90th episode of Parse, dive into the poetic retelling of Nizami Ganjavi’s timeless love poem, Leyli u Majnun, by the award-winning  poet and illustrator, Yann Damizen. In this book launch, you will hear from Aqsa Ijaz and Thomas Harrison who recently have translated Damizen’s work from French to English.  

Dive into the poetic retelling of Nizami Ganjavi’s timeless love poem, Leyli u Majnun, by the award-winning  poet and illustrator, Yann Damizen.

Majnun and Layla: Songs from Beyond the Grave

Translated from French by Aqsa Ijaz and Thomas Harrison.

Why do ancient tales resonate deeply even today? What makes a medieval classic relevant in our fast-paced, tech-driven world?

In Persian literary culture, retelling the narratives of the past was more than mere repetition. It was about bestowing contemporary readers with the rich legacies of the past, offering them guidance and grounding to imagine a more equitable future. These retellings bore a transformative potential, challenging the established narratives, renewing them for the present, while ensuring their continued relevance.

With Majnun and Layla: Songs from Beyond the Grave, Damizen revives this tradition, reimagining Nizami’s iconic tale of love, madness, and loss. For the first time, the story is retold from Leyli’s perspective, breaking the chains of poetic authority that silenced her for centuries.

In the 89th episode of Parse, Professor Carlo Cereti will present and discuss several passages taken from the Avesta and from Pahlavi literature, highlighting the chronological development of Zoroastrian thought about the end of times. The earliest texts to be discussed date to the early Achaemenid or immediately pre-Achaemenid period, while the later ones reflect Zoroastrian speculation in late Sasanian and early Islamic times.  

Carlo G. Cereti has newly joined the University of California as Endowed Ferdowsi Chair in Zoroastrian Studies and Professor of Classics and Religions, having served since 2000 as Full Professor of Iranian Studies at Sapienza University of Rome, Department of Ancient World Studies. From 2009 to 2017 he acted as Cultural Counsellor at the Embassy of Italy in Tehran. His earliest research work focused on the history of the Zoroastrian Parsi community in India, an intellectual interest that continued throughout his academic career, though currently his main research field shifted to Middle Iranian Languages and Literatures and more specifically to the study of Zoroastrian literature in Middle Persian.  

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaXUp3YTu6o&t=531s 

The 88th episode of Parse is an excerpt of a presentation given by Professor Nicolas Sims-Williams on surviving documents in the ancient Bactrian language, an Eastern Iranian language that has long been extinct. Numerous documents in Bactrian dating from the 4th-8th century CE have emerged since the early 1990s. They include letters, legal contracts and economic documents, mostly written on parchment; some of the latest documents are associated with a group of Arabic legal documents and tax receipts. Although there is no reliable information about where the documents were found, the majority can be shown from internal evidence to have been written in various parts of Northern Afghanistan. Very recently, a further collection of 4th-century Bactrian letters has come to light. These are written on birch bark and almost certainly come from somewhere to the south of the Hindukush. Dr. Sims-Williams describe these two groups of documents and discusses the question of whether either can be considered as constituting a single archive. 

 Nicholas Sims-Williams is an Emeritus Professor of Iranian and Central Asian Studies at SOAS University of London. He has published many books and articles on Middle Iranian texts and languages, including three volumes of Bactrian documents from Northern Afghanistan. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1_b8k0D_PA&t=443s 

In the 87th episode of Parse, Learn more about the carefully illustrated worlds of celebrated artist Shiva Ahmadi, one of the featured artists in the exhibition Being & Belonging: Contemporary Women Artists from the Islamic World and Beyond, which took place in the ROM July2023 to January 2024. In this illustrated talk, Ahmadi shares deep insight into her personal and professional histories, and how they filter through and are expressed in her creative work. 

Shiva Ahmadi‘s works cover a broad diversity of media, including watercolour painting, sculpture, and video animation. Having come of age in the tumultuous years following the Iranian Revolution, Ahmadi moved to the United States in 1998 and has been based in California since 2015. Borrowing from the artistic traditions of Iran and the Middle East, she critically examines global political tensions and social concerns to create striking, provocative, and powerful creations. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqxFi-02E90 

The 86th episode of Parse, is an except of Jenny Rose’s illustrated talk, based on research for her most recent book – Between Boston and Bombay: Cultural and Commercial Encounters of Yankees and Parsis 1771-1865 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Her book focuses on the early contact of Americans with Zoroastrians and their religion from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. American interest in the “Persian Religion” was informed initially through secondhand reports, but once direct trade with India was established close links were formed with Parsi merchants in Mumbai, which are documented in personal letters, journals, and logbooks now held in American libraries. This presentation explores some of these first-hand American records before a brief look at accounts of a few Parsis who made their way to North America at the time of the Civil War. 

Jenny Rose is an adjunct professor and historian of religions in the Zoroastrian Studies program in Claremont Graduate University’s Religion Department. She holds a doctorate in Ancient Iranian Studies from Columbia University.Rose lectures extensively at other academic institutions, museums, and Zoroastrian Association events throughout North America and Europe. She also leads study tours of some of the most important archaeological, cultural, and devotional sites in Iran and Central Asia. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNSPZhRXLYM&t=816s 

The 85th episode of Parse provides some reflections on the archival traces of the Gulistan harem and its residents during Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign (1848-1896). The Gulistan harem was a woman-dominated homosocial space, housed in a unique domestic institution wherein tradition, modernity, piety, cosmopolitanism, gender, class and racial differences were negotiated by a host of local and transnational residents and visitors. Leila Pourtavaf examines the complex social and physical structure of this institution and the everyday life of its residents—at various points estimated to be between 700 and 2000 wives and female relatives, as well as different classes of employees. An abundance of historical traces and archival documents left behind by these constituents mark the late-Qajar harem as fertile ground for exploring the historical, cultural, spatial, and gendered entanglements which defined the Iranian modernization project in the second half of the 19th century. 

Leila Pourtavaf is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at York University. Her research and teaching stand at the intersection of gender, modernity, and Middle Eastern history.  Dr. Pourtavaf is also a board member and faculty affiliate at the Tavakoli Archives in Toronto and the recipient of the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Scholar Award for 2023-2024. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LbGVrr5jc8 

The 84th episode of Parse is on Aziz Ahmad’s observations on “Hindu historiography,” in his book, Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment. The speaker in this talk, Supriya Gandhi, examines select Persian writings by eighteenth and nineteenth-century Hindu scribes and ask how they might illuminate the complex genealogies of modern Hindu thought. 

Dr. Gandhi is a historian of South Asian religions who teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. Her current book project draws on a corpus of neglected Persian and Urdu works to explore histories of religious universalism and secularism in modern India. Gandhi grew up in India and studied there as well as in the United Kingdom, Iran, and Syria before earning her doctorate at Harvard University. Her research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright and ACLS/Mellon foundations. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XTzA_5kNws&t=3435s 

Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Parisa Vaziri’s new book, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. 

Parisa Vaziri is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Cornell University. Her research and teaching interests explore critiques of history and the subject, as articulated primarily by black critical thought, poststructuralist theory, and film and media studies. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEd47-fuI5M&t=1635s 

In the historiography of modern Iran, legal archives are under-explored. Yet they are extremely rich sources that offer insight into the lifeworlds of marginal subjects, who exist at the threshold of the legitimate space of citizenship. In the 82nd episode of Parse, Dr. Jairan Gahan centers the constructed archival category of “sex-related crimes” to raise questions about the processes of producing archives – in particular legal archives – and what a critical approach to archives can offer scholars.   

Jairan Gahan is the Executive Director of the Canadian Society for Iranian and Persian Studies. She is also an assistant professor of History and Islam at the University of Alberta. She earned her PhD in Religious Studies concentrating on the many convergences and divergences between Islamic ideas and ideals and those of the modern world with an eye on women’s histories.  

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj2R_XFNZN4&t=27s 

The 81st episode of Parse is an excerpt of a talk given by Domenico Ingenito on his new book, من از نهایت شب حرف می‌زنم / Io parlo dai confini della notte/ I Speak from the Edges of the Night provides a critical edition and Italian translation of Forough Farrokhzad’s entire poetic production. The book features the Persian text of all the original collections of poetry published by Farrokhzad during her lifetime, along with pieces published posthumously, and a literary biography of Farrokhzad’s life and works.  

Domenico Ingenito is an Associate Professor of Iranian Studies and premodern Persian Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests center on ancient and medieval Iran, Persian poetry, visual culture of Iran and Central Asia, gender and translation studies, and premodern manuscript culture. 

This edition includes To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yfdfiaC09Q&t=915s 

The 80th episode of Parse is an excerpt of a lecture given by Dr. Eva Orthmann titled, “Bilingual Texts from India: Combining Arabic and Persian with Indic Languages”.  

Eva Orthmann is Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Göttingen. She obtained her MA degree in Islamic and Iranian Studies at the University of Tübingen in 1995, followed by a PhD in 2000 at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. She has afterwards worked as assistant professor in Zurich and spent two years as research fellow in Yale. In 2007, Orthmann has been appointed professor of Islamic studies in Bonn where she has also served as director of the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University. Since 2018, she is the director of the Institute of Iranian studies at the University in Göttingen. In her research, Eva Orthmann’s special interest is in subjects related to the Mughal Empire, occult sciences, especially astrology, and Indo-Persian transfer of knowledge and culture. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utcu7alDQpg&t=4160s 

The 79th of Parse is an excerpt of a talk given by Dr. Daniel Sheffield titled “Pragmatic Zoroastrian Theology: Mulla Firuz against the Anti-Vaxxers, Bombay, 1806”. The talk deals with how in the early 19th century when the smallpox vaccine first arrived in India, many Parsis were strongly against getting vaccinated because Zoroastrian priest Dastur Barjorji Khurshedji Darab Pahlanna issued a decree declaring vaccination to be impermissible for Zoroastrians, on account of what he viewed as a violation of Zoroastrian ritual purity laws concerning dead matter. Concerned with the potential failure of the Bombay government’s campaign to promote vaccination in the hinterland of Gujarat, the British governor of Bombay, Jonathan Duncan, commissioned a leading Zoroastrian scholar-priest named Mulla Firuz to compose a treatise in Persian arguing for the permissibility of the vaccine in Zoroastrian ritual law. In this talk, Sheffield presents the first English translation of Mulla Firuz’s treatise and argues how it is part of a broader study of developments in Zoroastrian thought during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. 

Daniel Sheffield is an Associate Professor of Iranian Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, at Princeton University. He is a scholar of the intellectual and social history of the Persian-speaking world and a specialist in the early modern history of the Zoroastrians of Iran and Western India.   

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjYp32sgqMQ&t=592s 

The 78th episode of Parse is an excerpt of a talk given by Pouneh Shahbani-Jadidi titled “A Psycholinguistic Approach to Teaching Persian as a Second Language”.  

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is an Instructional Professor of Persian at the University of Chicago. She was awarded a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Ottawa in 2012 and another Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Tehran Azad University in 2004. Her research focuses on second language acquisition and pedagogy, as well as psycholinguistics and Persian literary translation. She is the author of Processing Compound Verbs in Persian: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Complex Predicates (2014) and Translation Metacognitive Strategies (2009). She has also published What the Persian Media Says (2014) as well as the three-volume series of Persian language textbooks published by Routledge, entitled, Persian is Sweet. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhhvrFUDzos&t=703s 

The 77th episode of Parse is an excerpt of a talk given by Dr. Peyman Nojoumian titled “Innovative Technology in the Language Classroom: Using Virtual Reality in Task-Based Language Teaching”.   

Nojoumian is an Associate Professor (Teaching) of Persian at the University of Southern California. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Ottawa, Canada and two masters: one in Speech & Language Technology from KU Leuven, Belgium and one in Teaching Persian as a Foreign Language from Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran. He has published the Persian Learner Series and developed the Persian Learner’s Dictionary, a smartphone web app for Persian learners. His most recent publications include a chapter in the 2020 Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian.  

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr7jhIC2zl0&t=623s 

The 76th episode of Parse is an excerpt from a talk given by Zahra Khosrowshahi titled “Iranian Women Filmmakers: A Cinema of Resistance”. In this presentation, Zahra Khosroshahi discusses her current book project on the works of Iranian women filmmakers both inside and outside the country. She explores how women’s filmmaking confronts gender and representation, challenges the male gaze, and speaks from a position of agency. 

Zahra Khosroshahi was an SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto working on Iranian cinema. Currently, she is a Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. Zahra’s research explores how the visual medium challenges systems of power, and how filmmaking specifically functions as a form of resistance in Iran. Her doctoral thesis focused on Iranian filmmaker Rakhshan Banietemad’s work as a gateway into important discussions around gender, femininity, and the taboo. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7TeEpYKKc8&t=736s 

The 75th episode of Parse is an excerpt from a talk given by Dr. Erik Anonby and Dr. Jaffer Sheyholislami on Mapping Iranian Languages, using Kurdish as the case study.  

Erik Anonby is Professor of Linguistics and French at Carleton University. His research focuses on the documentation and mapping of Iran’s languages. Currently, he works with an international research team as editor of the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI). Jaffer Sheyholislami is Professor in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies at Carleton University as well. A world-renowned expert in the sociolinguistics of Iranian languages, with a focus on Kurdish, he has served as special issue guest editor for the International Journal of the Sociology of Language and is the lead editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Kurdish Linguistics. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pICrW0ny5k&t=3s 

The 74th episode of Parse is an excerpt from talk a given by Dr. Mahbod Ghaffari titled the “Grammaticalization of “Dāshtan”.  

Mahbod Ghaffari is an Associate in Persian Language and Culture at the University of Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics in Iran and a certificate in “Leadership in Higher Education” from the University of Oxford. He has taught Persian language and culture, Iranian cinema, linguistics, methodology, and translation, at different universities since 1998. He has published Fārsi Biyāmuzim/Let’s Learn Persian series in 5 levels, Persian for Dummies in 2018 and developed www.persianlanguageonline.com, which is a three-level interactive online Persian program (2013-2015). 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdl8kmNc8CM&t=1094s 

The 73rd episode of Parse is an excerpt of a talk given by Dr. Ali R. Abasi titled “Discourse Markers in Persian: Description and Instructional Implications for Learners of Persian”.  

Ali R. Abasi is an Associate Professor of Persian at the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland. Trained as an applied linguist, his primary research interests include second language writing, discourse analysis, and teaching Persian to speakers of other languages. Some of his publications have appeared in such journals as Second Language Writing, English for Specific Purposes, Language and Politics, and the International Journal of Applied Linguistics. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RQDseMY79w&t=729s 

The 72nd episode of Parse is an excerpt from a talk given by Dr. Azita H. Taleghani titled “Acquisition of Persian Differential Object Marker “râ”:  A Challenge for the Second Language Learners and Heritage Speakers.” 

Taleghani is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream in Persian language, literature, and linguistics at the University of Toronto. Her research has primarily focused on second-language learners and heritage speakers’ pedagogy, linguistic approaches in modern Persian literature, especially stylistic aspects in the poems of Persian women poets, Persian syntax, and morphology, as well as web-based and online language teaching. 

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvUeF3MNgkM 

The 71st episode of Parse is an excerpt a talk given by Karine Megerdoomian titled Linguistic Data Driven Approach to Persian Pedagogy: Practical Application to Compound Verbs. Megerdoomian is the Principal Artificial Intelligence Engineer at the MITRE Corporation. She is a theoretical and computational linguist specializing in less commonly taught languages, with emphasis on Persian and Armenian. Her computational experience has been mainly in morphological analysis, machine translation, information extraction, and lexical semantics.  

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN9VSV7y7ZY&t=459s