Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute wishes to congratulate the following two Ph.D. candidates for being awarded our Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Fellowship for Excellence in Persian Studies for the completion of their doctoral studies in academic year 2020-21.
Alexandra Hoffmann is a Ph.D. candidate in Persian Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, where she focuses on Classical Persian Literature from the 10th to the 15th century. She is expecting to defend her dissertation, entitled “Strong Warriors, Liminal Lovers, and Beardless Men: Male bodies and Masculinities in Pre-modern Persian Literature,” in Spring 2021. The dissertation aims to break new ground in the study of pre-modern conceptions of masculinity and corporeality in Classical Persian Literature. Ms. Hoffmann has served as Teaching Assistant for several Persian language classes and was awarded a Stuart Tave Teaching fellowship for her self-designed class “Masculinities in pre-modern Middle Eastern Literature,” which she taught in the Spring quarter 2020, while also working as a Teaching Consultant for the Chicago Centre for Teaching at The University of Chicago.
Parvaneh Rezaee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). Her research interests include discourse analysis, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and L2 learning. She has been a Graduate Assistant in the Persian Language, Linguistics and Culture Program at UHM for academic years 2015-2019, during which she was awarded the Roshan Institute Fellowship in Persian Linguistics, Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics three years in a row. She has also been the Persian instructor at the Intercultural Communications College in Honolulu, Hawaii, in the summer of 2016 and 2017. Ms. Rezaee expects to defend her dissertation, entitled “The Persian Particle dige in Professional- Client Interaction,” in Spring 2021.