The University of Arizona reported that four excellent students in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies (MENAS) received Roshan Institute Fellowships for Excellence in Persian and Iranian Studies in spring 2014. Parvaneh Hosseini is conducting her doctoral work on the subject of wrestling as the most important traditional national sport of Iran. Mehrak Kamali’s dissertation focuses on post-revolutionary Persian literature and in particular, the fictional representations of the lives of families of war veterans, martyrs and political dissidents. Sahar Aghasafari is a first year M.A. student who is exploring Achaemenid art and designs applied to fabric. Finally, Mojtaba Ebrahimian is studying the evolution of the conceptualization of modernism in Iranian prose between 1905 and 2005 for his Ph.D. dissertation.
UA also reported that several students successfully completed their Ph.D. degrees in MENAS over the past year. Farrah Jafari’s doctoral research focused on “Silencing Sexuality: LGBT Refugees and the Public-Private Divide in Iran and Turkey.” Fevziye Bahar Johnson wrote her dissertation on “Afghan Women and the Problematics of Self Expression: Silencing Sounds and Sounds of Silence” and also published “Load Poems Like Guns. Women’s Poetry from Herat, Afghanistan.” Julie Marie Ellison-Speight examined “Sadiqa Dowlatabadi: An Early Twentieth Century Advocate of Iranian Modernity” in her dissertation. In addition, Marie Donovan and Isra Yaghoubi obtained their Master’s degrees in MENAS. Roshan Institute would like to congratulate all of these outstanding students on their recent accomplishments and scholarly contributions to the field of Persian Studies.