Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute is proud to announce a new endowment to the University of Washington to establish the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Professorship in Persian and Iranian Studies, in support of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) and its successful Persian and Iranian Studies Program. The new endowed position will foster the creation of new courses in Persian and Iranian Studies, support interdepartmental projects and develop regional, national and international appreciation of Persian and Iranian cultural legacies.

This marks the first endowed professorship in NECL and its inaugural holder will be Dr. Aria Fani, who joined UW in 2019 as an Assistant Professor in Persian and Iranian Studies. During his first year, Dr. Fani taught topical courses in Persian literature and popular courses on Near Eastern travelogues and cinematic cultures. Dr. Fani has a Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and his research focuses on the Persian language and cultural heritage as shared medium for modern literary cultures of Iran and Afghanistan. He has published a textbook for the teaching of Persian as a heritage language and is currently working on a poetry collection by Bizhan Jalali titled Shades of Silence.

The new endowed position will foster the creation of new courses in Persian and Iranian Studies, support interdepartmental projects and develop regional, national and international appreciation of Persian and Iranian cultural legacies.

This is Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute’s second endowment to the University of Arizona. In 2003, an endowment for Roshan Institute Fellowship for Excellence in Persian Studies was established in NELC for outstanding graduate students in the field of Persian and Iranian studies.

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