Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute is pleased to announce the two-day conference, “Translating Islam: A Conference in Honor of Carl Ernst,” that will take place on October 6-7, 2017, at UNC Chapel Hill. Carl W. Ernst is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Islamic studies at the Department of Religious Studies and Director of the Persian Studies program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has devoted his academic life to the study of three areas: general and critical issues of Islamic studies, pre-modern and contemporary Sufism, and Indo-Muslim culture. From his first book, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (1985), to his most recent book, co-edited with Fabrizio Speziale, Perso-Indica: An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions (2017), he has focused on how Islamic concepts have traveled across time and space.

This conference, organized around themes in Islamic studies that Professor Ernst’s work has addressed, evokes and expands on the major contributions of this fertile, creative translator of texts, ideas, and traditions within the orb of Islam. Topics of the panels include: Islam at large, Indo-Muslim ventures, Translations issues, Sufi studies, and Islamic studies. A Persian Classical Music concert by the Rohab Ensemble will take place on Friday night, at the UNC Stone Center Auditorium. The Rohab Ensemble brings three acclaimed maestros from the celebrated Dastan Ensemble – Hossein Behroozinia (barbat – lute), Saeed Farajpoori (kamancheh – spike fiddle), and Behnam Samani (tombak – goblet drum), together with Hamid Behrouzinia (tar – lute) and will be accompanied by the lilting voice of Sepideh Raissadat (Roshan Institute Fellow, 2016).

Organized by the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East, the conference is free and open to the public; however, registration is requested.

Find more about the Conference

Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute would like to congratulate Dr. Anousha Sedighi on her appointment to the rank of Full Professor of Persian and Head of the Persian program at Portland State University in Oregon. Dr. Sedighi founded the Persian program in 2005 and launched the Persian minor, the only minor in the state of Oregon, in 2011. Dr. Sedighi’s areas of research are Persian linguistics, Persian language pedagogy, and Persian as a heritage language. She has published two books, Agreement Restrictions in Persian (Rozenberg & Purdue, 2008), which was re-published in 2011 by Leiden University and the University of Chicago Press, and Persian in Use: An Elementary Textbook of Language and Culture (Leiden University, 2015) for which she received a Roshan Institute Fellowship for Excellence in Persian Studies in 2010.

Two UCI Ph.D. students, Deanna Kashani and Soodabeh Malekzadeh, have each been awarded the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Fellowship for Excellence in Persian Studies for the completion of their doctoral degrees during academic year 2017-2018.

Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute would like to welcome Mrs. Carol Guillaume to the Louvre where she will assist Mrs. Gwenaëlle Fellinger, Curator in the Department of Islamic Art, with the organization of a major international exhibition on Qajar Art in 2018. Though French museums are rich in art from the Qajar period (1781 to 1925), most Iranian collections are not well known to the public. To remedy to this gap, Mrs. Fellinger has been conducting since 2012 an in-depth study of the Qajar collections kept in regional museums of France. Her study will culminate, with the assistance of our Fellow, to a major exhibition that will bring to light nearly 500 unpublished artworks preserved in national and private collections.

The Qajar Art Exhibition will run from March 28 to July 22, 2017, at the annex of the Louvre Museum in Lens, North of France. Along with the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, Mrs. Fellinger and Guillaume will organize an international colloquium on Qajar Art in June 2018 at Louvre-Lens. The two-day colloquium will enable scholars to study specific subjects that cannot be explained in depth in the exhibition nor in the catalogue. Papers from the colloquium will be published in 2019.

Mrs. Guillaume is a graduate of the Ecole du Louvre, where she specialized in Art History with an emphasis on Qajar collections.
Her fellowship period is from September 2017 to August 2018.

Find more about the Department of Islamic Art at the Louvre

Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute is delighted to announce a new grant to hold three annual programs at the UCI Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, under the leadership of Professor Touraj Daryaee, UCI Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies and Culture. Professor Daryaee, in collaboration with the new Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in Art History and Archaeology of Ancient Iran, will organize the annual Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Symposium on Ancient Iranian History and Civilization; while Nasrin Rahimieh, UCI Howard Baskerville Professor of Humanities, will organize the annual Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Symposium on Persian Language and Literature. The first symposium is planned for the fall quarter 2017, and the second symposium will be held in the spring quarter 2018. In conjunction with each symposium, the senior scholar will give a public Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Lecture, which will be open to the Orange County community. The lectures will be recorded and available online.

Roshan Institute Chair in Persian and Iranian Studies, Kamran Talattof, recently announced the full line-up of fall semester courses at the University of Arizona. Elementary, intermediate and advanced Persian language will be offered as well as courses in Persian media, Persian fiction, Iranian cinema, and Persian Literature.

A new course, “Poetry for the Prince: Medieval Persian Literature and the Royal Court,” will be taught by Dr. Austin O’Malley, the new Roshan Institute Assistant Professor in Persian and Iranian Studies at the Roshan Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Persian and Iranian Studies (Roshan GIDP). The course will investigate literary representations of kingship, explore the function of poetry in Medieval Iranian court settings, and study literary and courtly practices in historical context. It is open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Students can have a minor in Persian by taking 18 units of these or other courses offered in upcoming semesters at the University of Arizona. The Roshan GIDP also offers M.A. and Ph.D. programs in Persian and Iranian Studies.

Learn more about Poetry for the Prince course

Learn more about Roshan GIDP

Naveed Mansoori has been awarded the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Fellowship for Excellence in Persian Studies for the completion of his dissertation during academic year 2017-2018. Mr. Mansoori is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at UCLA. His dissertation entitled, “In Medias Res: Media, Representation, and Authority in Iran, 1941-2009,” focuses on a varied but unified group of writers -Sadeq Hedayat, Ali Shariati and Ahmad Fardid (1909-1994)– who all envisaged their projects as the creation, or recreation, of an Iran which possessed an authentic, Islamic (Shi’a) identity. Mr. Mansoori is expected to defend his dissertation in June 2018.

Established in UCLA Division of Humanities, the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Fellowship for Excellence in Persian Studies is intended to support one graduate student each year from across the humanities or social sciences who has an approved dissertation topic focusing on Persian studies.

Learn more about the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Fellowship at UCLA

The African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress (AMED), in cooperation with the Iranian-American Alumni of the Alborz High School, presented “From Oxus to Euphrates: The Sasanian Empire,” a day-long symposium open to the public, on June 7, 2017. The event was part of an annual series of symposia on the ancient civilizations of the Near East organized by AMED at the Library of Congress. The video of the entire symposium is now available on the Library’s webcast page and on YouTube.

The Sasanians ruled a large empire in Central and Western Asia, stretching from the Oxus River to the Euphrates and from the Hindukush to Eastern Arabia, for over 400 years (224-651 CE). Known as Iranshahr (the Domain of Iran), it was a powerful empire that engendered much of what came to be known as the Iranian culture in the medieval and modern periods.

The Symposium featured three panels of experts and scholars in the fields of ancient and classical history, Persian studies, and Central Asian and Near Eastern religious and confessional traditions. Hirad Dinavari, Library of Congress Iranic world reference specialist, moderated one of the three panels along with Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of AMED and Professor Fatemeh Keshavarz, Roshan Institute Chair and Director of Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, at the University of Maryland School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.