Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute is delighted to sponsor the all-day conference, titled The Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Symposium on Ancient iranian History and Civilization: Food and Drink in Ancient Iran, that is taking place on Tuesday, May 15, 2018, 9:30 am – 5:30 pm, in UC Irvine’s Humanities Gateway (HG) 1030.

This event is organized by Professor Touraj Daryaee, Director of UCI Jordan Center for Persian Studies & Culture, and Dr. Khodadad Rezakhani, Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University. The conference features two keynote addresses on the “Highlights of Ancient Persian Winemaking” and “What We Know about Medieval Persian Cuisine.” Following the conference, invited guests will be able to attend a reception, where a selection of food and desert from the Achaemenid to the Sasanian Period will be served, as well as contemporary Persian wine with Ancient Persian foods.

The day conference is free and open to the public. No registration is required.

The reception is by invitation only.

Find out more about UCI Jordan Center

In celebration of Noruz, Roshan Institute for Persian Studies will be presenting “Paradeisos: Origins and Historical Development of Persian Gardens,” a talk by Professor Mohammad Gharipour, as part of The Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Lecture Series at the University of Maryland, College Park. The Series is named in honor of Dr. Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali, the Founder, Chair and President of Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute.

Dr. Mohammad Gharipour is Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Previously, he taught at Southern Polytechnic State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Maryland Institute College of Art. He is the recipient of the Hamad Bin Khalifa Fellowship in Islamic Art (2007), the Sprio Kostof Fellowship Award from the Society of Architectural Historians (2008), the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute Fellowship for the publication of his book, Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in History, Poetry and the Arts (2010), the Morgan State University Award for Outstanding Research (2013), and the National Endowment in Humanities Faculty Award (2014). In February 2016, he was selected by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education magazine as one of twelve minority scholars who are making their mark in academia. Dr. Gharipour has published extensively on architectural and landscape history. He is also the Director and Founding Editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. He received his Ph.D. in Architecture from Georgia Institute of Technology (2009) and his Masters in Architecture from the University of Tehran (2001).

Monday, April 2, 2018 | 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. | HJ Patterson 2114/2118 | University of Maryland, College Park

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Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute is proud to announce the first major exhibition dedicated to the magnificent art of the Qajar dynasty, The Rose Empire: Masterpieces of 19th-century Persian Art, that will run at the Louvre Museum’s branch in Lens, northern France, from March 28 to July 23, 2018.

The Rose Empire: Masterpieces of 19th-Century Persian Art is a comprehensive and unprecedented overview of Qajar art, bringing together more than 400 works – paintings, drawings, jewelry, enamels, rugs, clothing, photographs and ceremonial weapons – all showcased by French fashion designer Christian Lacroix’s immersive and vibrant design.
The exhibition’s title is a reference both to Persian literature and to the seat of the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran from 1786 to 1925. It is named after the Golestan, the collection of poems by the 13th-century poet Saadi that was first translated into French in the 18th century by the orientalist Andre du Ryer under the title “The Rose Empire.” When the first Qajar sovereigns settled in Tehran, they gave their palace the same name, and to this day the kar-e Golestan (Golestan Palace) is still considered a masterpiece of Qajar art and architecture.

The exhibition is conceived as a stroll through the room of an opulent Qajar palace. Visitors enter the gallery through a monumental doorway inspired by a triple arcade that appears in a 19th-century Jules Laurens painting. The rooms are grouped into four architectural units, corresponding to the four main sections of the exhibition, and each unit is identified by different shades of a certain color that is characteristic of Qajar art: blue, red, green and yellow. The walls are hung with silk, and walkways are covered with rugs, recalling the sumptuousness of Iranian textiles.

Alongside the exhibition, curated by Gwenaëlle Fellinger, the museum is organizing a series of events and conferences, including an international colloquium reviewing current research on the art of the Qajar dynasty that will take place on June 21-23. All events will be hosted at La Scène, the main auditorium of the Louvre-Lens museum, situated in Lens, 200 kilometers north of Paris. The exhibition and accompanying colloquium are supported by the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Fund, established by Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute, as part of the Louvre Endowment Fund.

Learn more about the Rose Empire exhibition

Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute is delighted to announce the establishment of the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Fund for Iranian Music in support of the Iranian Music Program over a two-year period at the Department of Ethnomusicology in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology is the only one of its kind in the U.S. and the most celebrated program in the world for the study of diverse musical cultures.

The Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Fund for Iranian Music will enable UCLA to revive a program for the study of classical Iranian music, called Music of Persia, and the Persian Music Ensemble that were both initiated by Professor Hormoz Farhat in 1967, but regrettably removed from the curriculum in 1993, due to lack of funding. Thanks to our Fund, Department of Ethnomusicology Lecturer in Music, Dr. Amir Hosein Pourjavady, and Assistant Professor Munir Berken are now offering a total of eight classes on the music of Iran and the Persian-speaking world, covering both practical and theoretical aspects of major musical cultures of Iran, and in particular classical music. Persian Music Ensemble and Persian Music Ensemble-Percussion classes are offered on a quarterly basis, culminating in a year-end concert, for academic years 2017-2018 and 2018-2019.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will present a talk by Dr. Claudia Yaghoobi on her new book, Subjectivity in ʿAṭṭār, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism (Purdue University Press, 2017), on January 29, 2018, at the UNC FedEx Global Education Center.

By looking at ʿAṭṭār’s poetry contrapuntally with medieval European literature and modern theory, this talk will map out the ways ʿAṭṭār’s poetry interacts with itself within the Persian cultural and historical framework as well as with medieval European culture and modern Western theoretical perspectives in regard to the concepts of transgression and the breaking of taboos, and the construction of subjectivity. Traversing linguistic, national, and disciplinary boundaries, this talks calls into question the presumed differences between Medieval Islam and the West and makes possible a rich dialogue between civilizations that have historically been pitted against one another.